The Great Balloon Race Tragedy
For more than a century, those individuals who are charged with marketing Catalina Island as a year-round vacation destination have devised numerous and imaginative ways to achieve their ends. These marketing efforts often materialize in the form of events that the planners hope to become annual affairs.
Sometimes this works out well, including the Catalina Art Association’s art festivals, Two Harbors Buccaneer Days and the world-renowned Catalina JazzTrax weekends, to name a few.
But sometimes they don’t work out so well. The disastrous attempt to establish an annual boat race around Catalina Island in 1928, so rudely interrupted by a winter storm that resulted in all but one of the contestants having to be rescued, stands out as an example.
Such was the case with the “First Annual” Catalina Channel Balloon Race held in 1964, an event that actually featured some hefty celebrity action in the form of none other than actor Cliff Robertson riding in one of the balloons. Robertson was one of Hollywood’s more popular leading men of the day, having just come off the heels of playing John F. Kennedy in the well-received PT-109.
Like the Around the Island race, the Catalina Channel Balloon Race was to be held in the month of January, a month that has always been something of a blind spot in terms of visitor counts.
Saturday, January 18, 1964, was the fateful day for the event and the idea was for a number of large hot air balloons to take off from the old Wrigley Field in Avalon Canyon and, utilizing the northwest winds, sail over the channel to whatever landing they could make on the mainland.
Sponsored by the California Balloon Club, the event featured an army of reporters and cameramen and, of course, lots and lots of locals who had turned out for the fun.
The entrants in the contest—the balloonists and their balloons—numbered eight in all and included well-known balloonists Don Piccard and Ed Yost as well as a lone woman entrant, Barbara Keith.
Each balloon was also to have its own chase boat on the salty brine far below to stay in communication with the balloon crews and to record distance and speed information.
The weather on this particular morning was troubling (the event had already been postponed a week because of fickle January weather) and the balloonists all gathered together at the ball field for a meeting on whether or not they really wanted to do this thing.
It was a close call, they said, but they all agreed to give it a go, including Keith who was heard to say firmly that she was going to take off whether the others did or not.
Trouble started early for our airborne heroes when Piccard’s balloon went down on the East End before even getting out over the water. A bit of overcast was forcing the balloons to keep a somewhat low altitude in order to maintain visual contact with their chase boats.
The balloon in which Robertson was riding, which he was sharing with a man named Frank Tallman, actually dipped into the sea at one point where the gondola briefly capsized. The pair managed to get the balloon airborne again, but the two men were doomed to spend the rest of the contest soaked and freezing in the chill January winds.
By the end of the day, all of the other balloons had ditched in the ocean, save that of Ed Yost, who had intentionally landed his balloon in the surf at the mainland to avoid the large crowds gathered on the beach.
A banquet was held that night with all of the contestants in attendance—save one. As the evening wore on, the gathered race participants became more and more concerned that Barbara Keith was not present and no one seemed to know where she was or whether or not she had been accounted for.
The chase boat assigned to Keith’s balloon—the Melody Joe piloted by Jack Watts—had early on lost contact with the balloon through a combination of low cloud cover and choppy sea conditions that at one point forced Watts to return to Avalon Harbor.
By dusk, a report had come in of a balloon down in the sea with a smoke signal visible about 20 miles off San Onofre, but darkness was falling and at 7:00 p.m. the Coast Guard halted the search for the night and officially declared Keith’s balloon missing.
At daybreak the search began again and with the help of more reported sightings, the Coast Guard finally located the downed balloon. There, in the capsized gondola, they found the body of Keith who had died of hypothermia.
No attempt was made to hold the event the following year and like the 1928 Around the Island Race, the Catalina Channel Balloon Race faded into island lore.
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