A Snowball Fight from Hell
– The summer was over, with all the local fairs ending, “What’s next?” was the question shooting around the office. As the new Sales Manager I was tasked to fill the coming slow winter months. With Christmas coming, I focused on delivery of Santa Claus. “Old stuff,” most all shopping center associations replied. A set back? Not really, a salesman should be a good listener. I didn’t hear them say, “We don‘t want to use helicopters”. They said, “We want something new!” They’d had Santa delivered by copter, fire engine and squad car for years; I needed to dream up something, NEW!
Success at fairs had convinced me that barnstorming was still in vogue, “How about giving away a few free rides?”, I considered. A couple of November contracts were signed but we still had a lot of equipment sitting on the skids. “What these centers need is a COMPLETE advertisable package,” I determined. My presentation to our management . . . “Let’s provide a gimmick, a Gigantic Snowball Drop and Santa Delivery. We’ll give away six free rides (or helicopter models) identified by six out of three hundred Styrofoam snowballs dropped over the shopping center . . . at three times our normal charge. Hal and Bob said, “OK, give it a shot!” It was the shot in the arm we needed. The centers loved it. I sold two out of three centers visited. Wife, Sharon contracted stuffing the three hundred, two-inch Styrofoam balls with 2 x 4 inch tags advertising the individual center and noting the winners. A further stimulus was added permitting individual stores to offer extra gifts, they could advertise dozens of winners and . . . unload a bunch of dead merchandise otherwise scheduled for the Salvation Army. Sharon stabbed tags in balls, making twenty-five thousand snowballs that would pinwheel down (like falling Maple leafs) over eighty shopping centers during the six weeks before Christmas.
I made sure to pilot the first drop. Coming in low, about five-hundred feet over the center into a twenty-five knot blustery wind, Santa unzipped the modified side window and readied the first of three paper grocery bags full of tagged snowballs. This slow flight around the center brought out excited kids and parents. An appropriately roped and guarded area designated the drop zone for the balls and then Santa. We lined up for the second pass, going beyond the drop zone to let the wind drift the balls back to the crowd. Santa dropped the first bagful, then the second and third. One complete bag was sucked out of his hands but exploded open as it hit the rotor wash. I pulled up and started a left hand climbing turn to evaluate the effect. It was beautiful, not a great number of balls, but enough to create the effect of a descending cloud of snow. The balls hit the target, but wait . . . they struck the ground, blowing at 25 mph! A bigger cloud of thousands of kids was running after them, we’d NEVER considered this! Zigzagging through rows of cars, in front of others, kids were even crossing the divided roadways oblivious to oncoming traffic. Then, with sportsmanship observed only at international hockey matches, there were real snowball fights. Every ball caught was torn to micro-shreds; sometimes 6 kids on a ball, as they looked for prizes INSIDE the balls.
Gritting my teeth in fear for the kids, I pulled around to drop Santa. No one was in sight around the landing pad . . . they were all a quarter mile downwind. Since then, I have seen the TV sitcom, WKRP, where announcer, Wes Nesman, reports the similar delivery of turkeys at Thanksgiving. “Here comes the copter,” he reports, “they are opening the window and dispatching the turkeys . . . the turkeys are starting to fall, Oh heavens … they are in freefall! We forgot turkeys couldn’t fly; there goes one through a windshield and another. I can’t look . . . !” The writer of that show must have seen one of our drops. Eighty other drops were made, augmented to better hit the zone; with no incident reports, it was an eventual success with greater profit margin than the state fairs.
Barnstorming worked in 1960, I’ll bet it still works today … fly safe!
The featured helicopter above is available for sale today.