Don't take Adirondack Balloon Festival for granted

Rep. Stefanik oddly quiet about the results of Tuesday's presidential debate

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My scrapbook has lots of photos of hot-air balloons.

Lots and lots and lots.

There are photos from the late 1980s and early 1990s when we first moved to Glens Falls. There is another spurt of photos after Joseph was born in 1996 and sitting on his mother's shoulders.

When you are born in Glens Falls, you grow up with hot-air balloons all around you whether you like it or not.

And there are even photos from last year when I was drawn, not so much by the 50th anniversary of the Adirondack Balloon Festival, but giant penguin balloons.

I love penguins.

Three penguin balloon drew me to the Adirondack Balloon Festival last year.

None of this is unique for any of you. I suspect most of you have your own photos of the balloon festival at Crandall Park, SUNY Adirondack, the Moonglow in Lake George or any of those ridiculously early mornings at Warren County Airport.

If you've got relatives from out of town, sooner or later they all make their way here for balloon festival weekend to be amazed.

Of course, there is nothing worse - other than the traffic getting out of the airport - than finding out the balloons are grounded after being up since 4 a.m.

But here is the most important point. If you've been there on one of those perfectly calm mornings and witnessed 100 balloons ascending all around you almost simultaneously, well, then you know what heaven must be like.

A launch from 2023. We should never take the balloon festival for granted.

The tragedy is we take it for granted.

The shame is we often ignore this amazing event right in our own backyard to do chores in the yard, or watch a football game on television, because we've seen it before.

People can be fickle that way.

This is a reminder that Thursday the Adirondack Balloon Festival begins its second half-century of delivering wonder and awe and that none of us should take it for granted.

Mark Donahue, the current president of the festival, and Amy Lapoint, author of the book Pilot Memoirsm, were regaling a full-house at the Chapman Museum on Wednesday evening about what it takes to put on a balloon festival.

Donahue, who inherited the job from legendary founder Walt Grishkot and his wife Joan, must have teared up a half-dozen times telling stories about the balloon festival, the camaraderie, the dedication of the organizers and the ability to pull this event off for a half-century.

Twenty-three years earlier on 9/11, the balloon festival was in danger of being canceled. It was not something I remembered and certainly not something most of us were worried about at the time.

The FAA had grounded all aircraft after the attacks and the Adirondack Balloon Festival was told it would have to cancel.

"I had a direct link to (Sen.) Chuck Schumer the week before," Donahue remembered. "Then, three or four days before, I was told to `Hold everything!' We were eventually given the green light. We became the first national event allowed to go on after 9/11."

It made balloon pilot Allen Emer's actions possible later at the festival.

Balloon pilot Alan Emer actually did this in 2001 to cheers of “USA, USA, USA…”

Without the festival's knowledge, Emer rigged a harness and attached a wooden platform to the top of his hot-air balloon.

As his balloon inflated, Emer rode the balloon to the top where he positioned himself on top of the balloon and waved an American flag while patriotic music played below. As the crowd fspied Emer atop his balloon, cars began to honk their horns and and the crowd began to chant "USA, USA, USA..."

Yeah, Mark Donahue started crying then, too.

We all have our own stories of the balloon festival.

But here is something to remember for this year.

Donahue said sponsorships and donations are off 20 percent this year. He said inflation has hurt local businesses and they are cutting back. He mentioned several times during his presentation how Warren County had cut back on its bed tax contributions - including last year during the 50th anniversary - but he praised Queensbury supervisor John Strough for coming to the rescue.

Remember, the balloon festival is a non-profit that brings an astonishing number of visitors to our communities during the fall season.

Mark Donahue and Amy Lapoint at the Chapman Museum Wednesday night.

Fifty years is a long time to keep an event not only running, but appealing to visitors throughout the region.

Even now, it's hard not to stop what you are doing when you see the balloons on the horizon.

It's an event that continues to manufacture smiles and brighten days.

I'm sure when Mark Donahue reads that, there will more tears.

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Balloon festival Thursday

The Adirondack Balloon Festival will kick off its 51st year on Thursday at Crandall Park with a 5:30 p.m. balloon launch of 15 balloons.

It will continue Friday afternoon at Warren County Airport, Saturday morning and evening at the airport and Sunday morning at the airport.

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Stefanik mum on debate

Since Tuesday's debate, Rep. Elise Stefanik has been silent about the results of the debate.

Five hours before the debate she posted on social media:

"Today I joined @larry_kudlow on @FoxBusiness to discuss the many failures and crises of Kamala Harris that will be on full display for Americans tonight. The American people are smart. They know she is Joe Biden’s open border czar. They know she was the last one in the room when Biden called for the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. And they know we can’t afford four more years of her radical Far Left Democrat policies."

Since then, she has not posted anything on X.

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Ghost tours

The Lake George Historical Society is planning ghost tours every Friday and Saturday, beginning tonight, at 7:30 and 8:30 and continuing through October.

Tickets are $15 each.

You can get tickets online at:  www.lakegeorgehistorical.org.

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Wine and chocolate event

The popular Wine and Chocolate event to benefit the Chapman Museum will be held this year on Friday, Nov. 8 at the Queensbury Hotel. Make sure to mark you calendar.

If you know someone who would like to be a sponsor, tell them to contact me or Nicole Herwig at the Chapman Museum.

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Book Festival

The Saratoga Book festival is scheduled Oct. 4-7 this year all through downtown Saratoga Springs.

There will be more than 30 sessions scheduled during the weekend as well as a literary marketplace with some 90 local authors.

One event that caught my eye was "Warren Zanes Celebrates Springsteen's Nebraska in Song & Stories" on Saturday, Oct. 5 at Universal Preservation Hall.

Zanes' latest book is Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska.

You may have also heard there is a movie in development about the making of the Nebraska album.

Tickets are $35 for show, $55 if you want the book, too.

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Why the anger?

So often over the past 10 years we've heard about the working class and their anger at being left behind.

I grew in a working class family with most of my relative working in a family, but after years as a journalist my experience has been much different.

New York Times columnist David Brooks did an outstanding job of explaining the anger of Trump supporters in a few paragraphs that are worth thinking about:

Ruling-class Democrats live in very different worlds than high-school-educated Republicans. The average high school grad dies nine years sooner than a college graduate, is more likely to be obese, is much less likely to marry and is much more likely to divorce. The overdose death rate for high school grads is about six times as high as the rate for college grads. Of course working-class voters resent these inequalities.

Worse, educated-class folks have rigged the game. Children from affluent families tend to attend public and private schools flush with cash, while working-class kids don’t. By the eighth grade, children from affluent families are performing at four grade levels higher than children from poor families. According to Daniel Markovits of Yale, on the SAT, “students from families earning over $200,000 per year (roughly the top 5 percent) score 388 points higher than students from families earning less than $20,000 per year (roughly the bottom 20 percent).” According to a 2017 study led by Raj Chetty of Harvard, students from families in the top 1 percent of earners were 77 times as likely to get into the Ivy League as students from families making less than $30,000 a year. In that year students from the top income quintile were about 16 times as numerous at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as students from the bottom quintile.

Global populism is a revolt against these kinds of inequities — driven by the sense that the educated class has too much cultural, academic, political and economic power. The revolt is fueled when highly educated professionals condescend to or don’t even see the masses they are sitting on and when students at elite universities spending upward of $100,000 a year on them pretend to be the marginalized victims of oppression.

I don’t think it has ever been explained any bertter.

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Ken Tingley spent more than four decades working in small community newspapers in upstate New York. Since retirement in 2020 he has written three books and is currently adapting his second book "The Last American Newspaper" into a play. He currently lives in Queensbury, N.Y.