Balloon Pix
By Gus Kilthau
@Ceerios (4698)
Goodfellow, Texas
October 25, 2016 3:01pm CST
Balloon Pix -
I got to thinking of my good friend, Larry Hagerty, this morning. Larry is a really special guy, and one of his past (and possibly present) skills is that of flying those great big hot air balloons. In fact, he had a hot air balloon pilot license. Bet you hadn't already heard that people who go up (and come back down again) in hot air balloons were required to have flying licenses...
So, I dug out one of my Image Graphics CD's and went looking on it for a good photo of a hot air balloon - and I found a colorful picture of one that Larry would have liked right off. Playing around with that photo, soon enough I had three more balloon photos. One picture was still recognizable as the balloon it was.
After messing around with the balloon photo for a bit, I stuck the pix into a collage for your entertainment. I think that my friend, Larry, would have chosen the neon-light balloon for a ride. Either that, or he would have stuck with the one in the photo that shows itself as it really was in the beginning.
Larry wrote a book one time in which he told a story about some of his balloon-flying adventures. He used to fly out of a field located close to the northern edge of Dallas, Texas. The prevailing winds would blow his balloon directly over the field of a farmer whose herd of dairy cattle provided the farmer a good living through the sale of milk. The dairy farmer became angry at the balloonists who flew over his cattle herd because the noise made by the propane burners (that supplied the hot air to the balloons) frightened the cows and caused them to stop giving milk.
After a time, as the balloons flew over his fields, the farmer would run along below and shoot at the balloons with his shotgun.
According to my friend, Larry, he had two hobbies. One was hot air balloon flying. The second hobby was practicing for a shooting war.
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Balloon photo from my Image Graphics CD, Edit by Gus Kilthau
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2 people like this
2 responses
@pgntwo (22405)
• Derry, Northern Ireland
28 Oct 16
@Ceerios From one of my favourite authors:
The Taoist Tai Chi 108-Move Set This is an excerpt from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. How To Fly © by Douglas Adams There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Pi
1 person likes this
@Ceerios (4698)
• Goodfellow, Texas
11 Nov 16
@Hatley - Ms Patsie - I was given the task of editing Larry's new book in which the story about the farmer shooting at the hot air balloons was featured in a chapter. For all of the chapters in Larry;s book I provided a little "quotation" on each chapter's first page. On the chapter with the farmer-shotgun story I couldn't find a good quotation to stick onto the first chapter page, so I made one up - a quotation that had somehow to do with farmers and people who shot at folks. The quotation was something close to this:
"After all, some of my best friends are farmers." "King George III"
And of course, King George was the English king who warred on the Revolutionary farmers who shot back during the American Revolution.
What was really funny about that deal was not so much the quotation that I made up and tied to King George to grace the chapter about the farmer shooting at those hot air balloons, but was what Larry did when he read the quotation I had made up.
Larry asked me, "Did King George really say that?"
I still laugh at the whole thing all these many years later - like right now, for instance. -Gus-
