BY ANNA HERKAMP
DANVILLE — Area hot air balloon enthusiasts celebrate Thanksgiving in their own special way.
Anyone who cares to share in their tradition is welcome to join them this year for the 13th Annual Les Nessman Memorial Turkey Drop.
The event at Turtle Run golf course will begin at 6:45 a.m. and involves balloon teams that take off in their balloons and drop “turkeys” on a target on the ground.
But don’t worry: no animals are harmed during the event.
The turkeys are actually rubber chickens each team dresses up in humorous ways.
One last year was dressed up like Sarah Palin.
The drop is in honor of the memorable episode of “WKRP in Cincinnati” in which the news director, Les Nessman, gives a radio play-by-play of live turkeys being dropped “like sacks of concrete” onto a parking lot in a studio promotion.
This year’s event will feature between 10 and 15 ballooning teams from the area and other states, including Virginia and Indiana.
The day includes a private breakfast for the balloon teams, a best-dressed turkey contest and a “gobble-off” gobbling contest for crew members.
“The crew members have to get up in front of everybody and gobble. Whoever has the best gobble wins,” explained Larry Owen, a Danville balloon pilot.
The teams will also sponsor an auction that will benefit scholarships the local ballooning association gives out each year.
The scholarships benefit students from rural areas. Often, the local pilots land in fields owned by farmers, and the scholarships are a way of saying thank-you, said Owen.
Owen and his wife, Sheelagh, are active with the drop every year.
“Sheelagh does all the turkeys,” Owen explained.
She’s the one who made the Palin “turkey” last year.
Sheelagh’s other turkeys have been dressed up like Carlton and other pilots.
“She’s had just about any kind of turkey you can think of,” he said.
The rubber chickens aren’t the only ones who dress up, Owen explained.
Some pilots and crew members dress up with turkey hats. One person had a turkey suit on last year.
The flight won’t take place if there’s bad weather. It has to start early in the morning in order to avoid the day’s highest winds.
“We’ve gotten a flight off every other year,” said Dean Carlton, who founded the event.
But Thanksgiving Day is still a day to see people who live elsewhere.
Carlton got into ballooning because of his workplace, which always sponsored a balloon in the Balloon Classic.
“In 1997, I decided that this was an awful lot of fun and that we needed to do this more than three days a year,” he said.
The ballooning community in the area is a tightly knit one much like a family.
Betsy Kleiss, of Champaign, is also a pilot and plans to fly at this year’s drop.
The contest, she says, isn’t really much of a contest.
“The contest is not so much a contest… it’s more or less just to have fun. Sometimes people will move the target to make sure you hit it.
“We don’t take this very seriously at all,” she kidded.
