Pardon me while I have a nostalgic interlude: My neighbor just found a crumpled and yellowed copy of The Evening Sun from Saturday, June 17, 1978 and it has my name on it.
In fact, my byline appears twice on the front page — over both a news story about the Great Baltimore Balloon Race and my first-person account of being a passenger in one of the balloons, a cheap thrill from early in my Sunpaper days.
This happens: Old clippings from The Evening Sun and Sun show up from time to time. My brief, positive review of the shrimp lo mein at a Chinese carryout appeared for decades under bullet-proof glass at the front counter. A Hunt Valley mechanic kept a framed copy of the column I wrote about him on a shelf in his shop.
These gestures are flattering.
Far less flattering — and more sobering — is the reminder that Baltimore’s daily newspapers had many secondary uses: Table coverings for crab feasts and wrappings for glassware on moving days. Pigeon fanciers used them to line pigeon coops. Some households used newspapers to insulate walls.
My neighbor found the old Evening Sun when contractors opened up a wall in his house. I uncrumpled it and instantly recognized the front page; it was like prying open a time capsule.
Quick history: The Evening Sun was established in 1910 as the fun-loving, sporty sister of The Baltimore Sun, the gray senior sibling paper published on North Calvert Street. The Evening Sun was one of two afternoon dailies that, combined, served more than 400,000 readers throughout most of the 20th Century. The other was The News-American, a Hearst publication that operated out of a building long ago demolished for the surface parking lot on East Pratt Street, across from Harborplace.
The News-American folded in 1986, and The Evening Sun lasted until 1995.
Back in 1978, I was a reporter scheduled for a Saturday shift covering crime and breaking news. (The Evening Sun was published six days a week, the morning Sun seven.)
The managing editor, Philip Heisler, suggested I weasel my way aboard one of the six-story-high, hot-air balloons entered into the Great Baltimore Balloon Race. It would have been called the Preakness Balloon Race, but the Preakness had come and gone by mid-June. The annual event, an exciting tradition, had been delayed four times since Preakness Week because of lousy weather.
But organizers renamed the race and scheduled it one more time — with an early-morning launch from Patterson Park.
Even then, however, weather was a factor. It started to rain again as the race got underway.
I managed to get aboard a balloon piloted by a former Navy aviator, a congenial fellow named Paul Tychsen. Our balloon and the others in the race were supposed to cross the Chesapeake and land somewhere on the Eastern Shore. But rain and wind forced a course change —- north/northeast — and a different challenge: Instead of trying to be first, the winning balloon would be the one closest to the finish.
“We’re playing hare and hound,” Tychsen said.
That meant a lead balloon, the so-called “hare,” would take off first; the rest of us, the “hounds,” would follow and try to land as close as possible to where the “hare” touched down.
I relished the opportunity to get out of Saturday crime reporting.
We took off in light rain, with Tychsen firing hot air from a vertical propane burner. Once aloft, that was the only sound, the occasional roar of the gas burner.
We sailed over Patterson Park, just above the trees, and then higher, floating over East Baltimore. I felt like Juan Peron on a balcony, surveying his city and waving to citizens below, except the balcony was moving, the sites changing and my association of this pleasant experience with an Argentine dictator a bad one.
Anyway, as I remember it, we sailed over the many blocks of rowhouses between Patterson Park and Clifton Park, following the “hare” balloon.
But no one got very far. The rain turned heavy. The “hare” landed on a field, either in Clifton Park or near it. Other balloons put down all over the area. Tychsen landed ours, with some bumps and thuds, on a grassy hillside near City College. The race had lasted only 30 minutes.
The pilot was disappointed, but not I. The brevity of the race gave me time to catch a cab back to the Sunpapers, take the elevator to the fifth floor, contribute notes to my colleague Larry Olmstead for the lead story, knock out a 16-paragraph account of my experience, and see my words in print by noon. Blue-and-gold Sunpaper trucks then delivered the Saturday edition of The Evening Sun to distributors. The distributors delivered the paper to subscribers. One of the subscribers apparently admired our immortal account of the balloon race so much he insulated his house with it. At least we didn’t end up in a pigeon coop.
