SHOW BUSINESS: The Balloon Man

When Jean Abel Gros (pronounced grow) first saw the famed pre-Christmas parade of Manhattan’s R. H. Macy & Co., Inc. 13 years ago, he got an idea. A showman with a small boy’s taste for shows, Jean Gros, 54, had spent years building up a marionette road-show business. He had lost it all staging a grand opera with puppets (75 singers were hidden behind the curtain). He decided that if he could get huge balloon figures like Macy’s, and somehow design them to fit under trolley wires, he could stage such parades on any Main Street in the U.S.

Last week he was doing just that. In Niagara Falls, N.Y., Columbus, Ohio, Wheeling, W. Va. and eleven other cities and towns, hundreds of thousands of children turned out to watch department-store parades featuring Jean Gros’s balloons. He had a dragon 100 ft. long, a 450-ft. train with rubber figures of people and animals poking their heads out of the windows, Santa Claus, and a string of jeeps.

Before the short (Nov. 1 to Dec. 15) season ends, Gros’s three units will have staged 102 parades to a total audience of around 15 million. Said Gros joyfully: “Just like marionettes, only a hell of a lot bigger.”

Gros himself designed some of the biggest of his 250 balloons, got Goodyear to make many of them to specification (none higher than 16½ ft.). He has a regular staff of 20 to keep them repaired and innate them for parades, hires 200 extras in every town to dress as clowns and man the floats’.

He charges customers—which include Chambers of Commerce as well as big stores—according to the size of parade they want. For example, a 45-minute parade a mile long with 50 balloons runs around $4,500. Out of what he calls “this crazy business,” Gros will gross around $200,000 this year, but, like most showmen, he refuses even to guess his net. Said he: “It’s like a Broadway play. You run for months just to break even and count on those last two weeks for your profit.”