'THEY'RE SURE INA A HURRY TO DIE'
UES couple’s doomed bid to cross the Atlantic by balloon
THE crowds began to gather at dawn, although dozens of people had insisted upon camping out all night on a sprawling Hamptons meadow, fearful of missing even a minute of the momentous event — the launch of the Free Life, the helium balloon poised to become the first ever to cross the Atlantic.
For four years, residents of the Springs hamlet in East Hampton, where summer regulars have included artist Willem de Kooning and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jean Stafford, had pitched in to help two unlikely adventurers prepare for the more than 3,000-mile journey. Local merchants donated meals and supplies, and one cafe owner housed the amateur aeronauts — actress Pamela Brown, 28, and her commodities-broker husband, Rodney Anderson, 32 — for free.
Abercrombie & Fitch outfitted the crew with survival gear. A volunteer built shelves inside the balloon’s circular gondola, which measured 12 feet wide by 4 feet deep, and lined with hundreds of ping pong balls for buoyancy. A case of champagne for the celebratory landing in France five days later was stowed inside.
British balloonist Malcolm Brighton, 32, signed on to pilot the giant 80-foot-tall orange and yellow Free Life just a month before the journey.
On the day of the launch — “a sparkling September Sunday” in 1970, noted Esquire magazine — the Springs fire department filled the balloon with gas from tanks stacked on trucks. There was a festive air as families lugging picnic baskets accompanied by excited children and dogs carved out their space on the grass, a scene the Easthampton Star described as “a beautiful, old-fashioned, surrealist pageant.”
By the time the balloon lifted off in the early afternoon, more than 1,500 were gathered.
“The launch was so perfect,” said filmmaker Genie Chipps Henderson, 78, a member of the ground crew who recently produced a commemorative film about the event for the East Hampton LTV network.
“There was not a cloud in the sky as this incredible eight-story balloon lifted off as if it was a ballet dancer.”
“We punched each other in the arm,” recalled poet Rosita Benson as she watched the balloon glide across Gardiners Bay and the Long Island Sound. “History.
We were part of history.”
But others were not so buoyant. Film producer Alfred Crown told Esquire, “They’re sure in a hurry to die, aren’t they?”
BROWN and Anderson were so sure of making history that they sold off their furniture and left their Upper East Side apartment to raise more than $100,000 for their grand adventure. “They called it feeding the monster in the backyard,” said Henderson.
When their money ran out, Brown turned to her successful Kentucky clan. Brown’s father, John Young Brown, was a powerful attorney and state legislator, who indulged his favorite daughter and helped finance the trip. Brown’s older brother had taken over Kentucky Fried Chicken six years before.
It was Anderson who became obsessed with the idea of the trans-Atlantic balloon trip, according to Henderson. A classical pianist and amateur navigator who had learned to use a sextant, he had recently worked as director of admissions at New York University and enlisted the school’s leading meteorological expert to help plan the journey.
It would be the fifth attempt at an Atlantic balloon crossing since 1873. The most recent, in 1968, ended when two Canadians crashed off the coast of Nova Scotia.
Brown, a former Miss Lexington who was an actress in commercials and a regular on the daytime soap opera “Love is a Many Splendored Thing,” was eager to participate. She would document the flight for a book the crew planned to write after the journey.
As teenagers, she and Henderson had built a raft to sail down the Mississippi River like Huckleberry Finn.
“We were going to have an adventure,” recalled Henderson, adding they only made it as far as a mile down the Kentucky River — far from the mighty Mississippi — before abandoning the plan. “Pam was just a full-of-life kind of person, eager to try anything.”
But the Free Life had deadly issues.
The crew was so short of money that they never conducted a test flight and they couldn’t afford an $8,000 quickrelease system that would disengage the balloon’s ropes if they needed to be cut loose in an emergency, especially if the balloon came down on rough seas, said Henderson.
The original balloon pilot, Jim Contos, abruptly quit a month before the journey, citing a lack of safety mechanisms, Life magazine reported.
“Nothing about it made sense, neither the balloon nor its clientele,” said British scientist and balloonist Anthony Smith, who chronicled the endeavour in the 1990 book “The Free Life: The Spirit of Courage, Folly and Obsession.”
“Right from the start, it was a venture that would lead inexorably to death,” Smith said.
EVEN Brighton, an experienced balloonist taught by Smith who was about to embark on his 100th flight, had doubts, and he noticed flaws in the balloon’s construction.
“I think I could have done better,” he quipped in a radio interview before the flight. In fact, the Sept. 20 launch was delayed for several hours because a three-foot rip had appeared in the balloon’s outer shell.
The crew borrowed gaffer tape from a Life magazine photographer to patch up the tear and shrugged it off as a minor mishap — a rip in the inner lining would have been more worrisome, said Henderson — according to reports.
Unlike hot-air balloons, which rely on onboard burners to heat the air in order to lift the balloon, helium balloons are filled with lighter-than-air gas. However, if helium gets too cold, its buoyancy diminishes.
To counter that, a secondary system heats air inside an envelope surrounding the helium container, allowing the balloon to stay aloft in cold weather.
Later, Mark Semich, the balloon’s designer who had built the vessel in Idaho, told The New York Times the crew had dangerously decided not to carry “a drag line” — a 500 foot cable with 300 pounds of logs tied to the end. The logs were designed to trail in the water at night. After sundown, balloonists drop sand or other ballast from the gondola to reduce weight as their helium becomes heavier.
“My system in effect gives you ‘recoverable ballast,” Semich said.
“You drag the logs into the water at night, which has the same effect as getting rid of ballast, and during the day they came up out of the water.”
The excitement leading up to the launch was at such a fever pitch in Springs, there was no turning back. “Better go and chance to luck rather than the dismal certain horror of chosen failure,” said Brighton, a father of two young children.
“There came a point when they couldn’t stop,” said Henderson. “They just had to go ahead with it.”
Thirty hours after launch, on Sept. 21, the Free Life was swept up in a violent storm 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland.
Brighton radioed for rescue as the balloon rapidly lost altitude: “We are ditching . . . We are 600 feet and descending. Signing off. Will try contact after landing.”
That was the final message from the crew at 7:05 p.m.
THE air-heating system had failed, according to the Times. Experts believe the crew was then overwhelmed by 20-foot waves and dragged under because the vessel lacked the release mechanism that would have allowed the gondola to be separated from the sinking balloon.
Brown’s family set up a command center in New York City to work with the US and Canadian coast guards, whose search was initially hampered by the ferocity of the storm.
After five days, Brown’s sister called psychic Peter Hurkos, who had worked with police in Ann Arbor to help solve the murder of six girls and claimed to have identified Charles Manson as the ringleader in a Los Angeles murder spree in 1969.
Hurkos claimed the crew was still alive.
Henderson accompanied Hurkos to Newfoundland where the Brown family chartered a small plane that flew over the choppy waters of the North Atlantic. After a few days, the search was called off. Hurkos said they were dead.
“Nobody can stand the absolute disappearance without a trace,” said Henderson. “Every family needs some sort of closure, If they could have found anything, it would have been a comfort to them. But nothing ever washed ashore. It all remains a complete mystery.”
Decades after the balloon went down, dozens of residents gathered to remember the daring crew who had put Springs on the map. Their reactions at a public meeting moderated by Henderson and sponsored by LTV and the Springs Historical Society in 2015 are shown in Henderson’s film, “The Free Life 50th Year Tribute.”
“We just thought this was the most magical thing,” said Lucia Miller, who was 12 when her father took her and her brother to watch the launch, which took place on her uncle George Miller’s field.
“Even later, when we found out what had happened . . . it was not a loss of innocence. For us what was important was that someone had tried something . . . They had gone up.”
Eight years after the Free Life disaster, the Double Eagle II, a helium balloon similar to the Free Life, successfully crossed the Atlantic, landing near Paris on Aug. 17, 1978, more than 137 hours after setting off from Presque Isle, Maine.