Module 11: Balloons over Broadway

APA Reference of Book: Sweet, M. (2011). Balloons over Broadway. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Books for Children.

Summary: Anthony “Tony” Sarg is a marionette maker who moves to New York City to find work. Macy’s department store hires him to create a puppet store display for their store window. It becomes so popular that Macy’s asks him for his help to plan a parade that reflects the various holiday traditions of their immigrant employees. On Thanksgiving Day of 1924, Macy’s holds their first holiday parade. Tony improves the parade by creating large rubber animals that are part puppet and part balloon. Next, Tony devises a way to make the gigantic puppets more articulate by creating them out of rubberized silk, filling them with helium, and controlling them from below rather than above as an actual marionette. His balloon animals are a great success and are the reason why Macy’s holiday parade is still famous and well-loved today.

Impressions: This is an excellent book that might inspire children to be creative, explore their interests, and think outside the box. The topic of the book is unique. The colorful full-spread illustrations are very attractive and interesting to look at it. Some of the illustrations look like a collage, made of different materials such as fabric, buttons, string, paint, a vintage-looking map of the parade route, a snippet of a newspaper article, etc. I love it that the author made her own puppets, creatively used collages for many of the illustrations, and used actual illustrations from The Tony Sarg Marionette Book and original Macy’s parade advertisements from a 1933 issue of the New York Times. This book is inspiring and I hope it inspires readers to invent, create, and diligently pursue their dreams while having fun.

Professional Review: “Tony Sarg (1880-1942, "rhymes with aargh!"), the man who invented the giant balloons of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, has found a worthy biographer in Caldecott Honoree Sweet (A River of Words). With lighthearted watercolors, fanciful scrapbooking, and collaged typography, Sweet shows how Sarg, a self-taught immigrant, combined an indomitable curiosity with an engineer's know-how and a forever-young imagination. The story walks readers through each stage of Sarg's development as a master of puppetry--his childhood fascination with mechanics and marionettes, his first big break as a developer of window displays for Macy's, and his early earthbound parade creations (essentially air-filled rubber bags that were steered down the street). And then comes the light-bulb moment: "With a marionette, the controls are above and the puppet hangs down…" writes Sweet. "But what if the controls were below and the puppet could rise up?" The rush that comes from inspiration, the cliffhanger moments of creation, the sheer joy of building something and watching it delight the multitudes--Sweet captures it all in what is truly a story for all ages.”

Cooper, I. (2011). Balloons over Broadway: the true story of the puppeteer [Review of the book Balloons over Broadway: the true story of the puppeteer, by M. Sweet]. Publishers Weekly, 258(32), 46. Retrieved from http://libproxy.library.unt.edu:2200/ehost/detail/detail?vid=3&sid=9ea9c3b3-9aea-4bab-ba9c-96a4b3510b83%40sessionmgr106&hid=130&bdata=JnNjb3BlPXNpdGU%3d#AN=503018163&db=brd

Library Uses: Bring different types of materials, such as buttons, fabric, string, glitter, paper from magazines and newspapers, stickers, etc. for the children to create collages. Tell them that they can create a collage to design a new balloon creature for the Macy’s holiday parade, or allow them the freedom to design anything they desire.