On Sept. 27, 1986, Cleveland set out to break a world record by sending well over a million balloons into the sky above Public Square. Within hours, many of them were coming back down on the city, and some eventually turned up across Lake Erie in Canada.
The release was a United Way of Cleveland fundraiser meant to top a record set at Disneyland the year before. Organizers brought in balloon expert Treb Heining, who had run that Disneyland release. When he first saw Public Square and the Terminal Tower, he said, “This is perfect,” according to a Cleveland Magazine oral history of the event. The original goal was 2 million balloons, but fundraising came up short and the target was trimmed to about 1.5 million.
Guinness ultimately recorded 1,429,643 balloons, according to Defector, tens of thousands short of a count that usually gets rounded up to 1.5 million…