LOOK! UP IN THE SKY

Concerned residents and motorists throughout Western Massachusetts couldn't believe their eyes as they tried to determine what they were looking at high in the sky. 

Garrett Cashman (27) of Albany, NY, left Wynantskill, NY, at approximately 7:00 a.m. on July 21, 1955, and touched down on Walter D. Anderson's farm on Vining Hill Road in Southwick, Mass., at about 10:15 a.m. 

Cashman, a part-time hypnotist and mailorder dancing teacher, made the roughly 80-mile flight across the Berkshires and into the Pioneer Valley suspended from a 35-foot net attached to 82 balloons. The balloons measured five feet in diameter, except two measuring eight feet. 

Mrs. Cashman drove to Southwick to retrieve her husband and his flying contraption. 

Cashman attracted quite a crowd of concerned residents who phoned police when they watched him as he flew through the air attached to 60 balloons on his first trip, which lasted 21 miles, on September 9, 1954. The balloons were gas-filled with the help of the local power utility, which tapped into a gas line. The utility company charged him $43.30. Upon landing, New York State Police arrested Cashman for flying without a license. A judge set his bail at $100.00 and later fined him $50.

Cashman took a flight in freezing temperatures from a rowboat in November 1954 but disappeared into the Adirondack Mountains. Thankfully he landed safely, although frozen, some 45 miles away hours later. Following this event, he scrapped future winter trips because it was too cold.

Cashman would sit on a piece of plywood attached to a bicycle rim. To take off, he would release sand from bags weighing him down. To land, he would use a slingshot to fire fishing line sinkers at the balloons to puncture them (initially, he cut them loose). 

It appears Cashman was most active between 1955 and 1957, and police arrested him several times.