Viewing page 14 of 29

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Broadwick - 3

get away from the balloon. I had my knife to cut the balloon, and I pulled that. I fell I guess about ten or twelve feet to the ground. But the balloon collapsed and tore down the tent. On the part that it was split, the air had caught it, and the balloon tore off one end of the tent there, but nobody was hurt. I was shook up but I wasn't seriously hurt. In later years I had broken bones and dislocated shoulders from  dropping in hot air balloons.
 
I was young. I just kind of grew up with it and I loved it. I loved the excitement.

Q:  Your father was the one who taught you?

Broadwick: He was my foster father, not a real father, no relation at all. I just went out one day, when it was close to my home town and I saw this balloon go up, and I said, "That's what I want to do." I went out and hung around till theya all came back to the lot where the balloon had left from, and that's how I happened to join up with the carnival.

The first day I saw it, I went up in the balloon, and I don't think ever in my young life I'd experienced anything so exciting. I was just hellhound and determined that I was going to get in the [[strikethrough]] set [[/strikethrough]] act. As I said before, I just stayed there, till they came back. Well, of course, when they came back, Mr. Broadwick talked to me, and he knew I was not of age, so he had to get my mother's permission for me to travel with him and make these balloon drops. That was that.

He used to do trapeze stunts in the air, like most balloonists did --  just get up and perform on the trapeze. But he was mostly the man on the ground that built the parachutes and built the balloons. He was the jumper himself. Whenever anybody got hurt in the [[strikethrough]] set [[/strikethrough]] act, Mr. Broadwick would go out and do the drops himself. I guess he'd broken every bone in his body, from dropping from balloons, and being too heavy to fill in and keep the [[strikethrough]] set [[/strikethrough]] act up as he advertised it.