For Years A Balloon Watcher,

Aloise Mulvihill Finally Gets A Ride

By Kaaren Valenta

When Newtown resident Aloise Mulvihill was teaching at the King Street Primary School in Danbury more than 20 years ago, she read a book about hot air ballooning to her second grade students.

The book sparked a fascination with hot air ballooning that culminated recently when Ms Mulvihill and her friend, George Dolan, celebrated their birthdays with a hot air balloon ride, courtesy of their children and grandchildren.

“It all started with the book,” Ms Mulvihill recalled. “It was a biography about the Montgolfier brothers, who flew the first balloon in France in 1783. After we read the book, I heard about Dave Remele [a King Street resident] who had a balloon. I was team teaching second grade so I asked him to bring the balloon to show the two classes.”

By the time the Mr Remele and his crew arrived with the balloon, the audience had grown to include the entire enrollment of the elementary school and also the nearby intermediate school. A newspaper article about the event shows hundreds of students gathered on a field watching the inflation of the multi-colored balloon.

Afterward, Aloise Mulvihill, who is called “Lucy” by her friends, found that her fascination with hot air balloons continued to grow.

“I used to chase them,” she said. “There used to be a lot of balloons in Newtown. Harvey Hubble used to come out of the Ram Pasture quite often.”

Now retired, Ms Mulvihill’s long career as a teacher began in a one-room schoolhouse in Newtown after she graduated early as a “cadet teacher” from what was then known as Danbury State Teachers’ College, and is now Western Connecticut State University.

 “I graduated from [Newtown] high school in 1941 and when I started college, I was in a coed class,” she said. “By the time I was a sophomore, it was an all-girls school because the boys had all gone off to fight in the war.”

During World War II there was such a shortage of teachers that Ms Mulvihill’s class was put into an accelerated program, attending school in the summer and graduating in the fall of 1944 instead of in the spring of 1945.

“I completed my final training in October 1944 and in November I started teaching in Newtown,” she said. “Hawley School was going to be expanded, but in the meantime, they reopened the one-room schoolhouse on Huntingtown Road, right across from the synagogue, where I taught, and the school across from George’s Restaurant on Route 302.”

After teaching in the one-room school for four years, the Hawley School addition was completed. Ms Mulvihill moved with her class to Hawley and taught there for a year.

“I got married in 1951 and moved to Danbury,” she said. “When I had children, I became a stay-at-home mom. But when my youngest child, Rita, was in kindergarten, I took a teaching job at St Joseph’s school, where my children attended, and I taught there for seven years.”

Eventually she taught at Roberts Avenue primary school, then at the King Street School, retiring in 1987. But she had long before moved back to Newtown.

“My husband, Bill, and I had moved back in the early 1970s, to the same house on Pole Bridge Road in Sandy Hook where I grew up,” she said. “It was a small house so we enlarged it to fit our family.”

One morning she and Bill were asleep in the bedroom of their home in Sandy Hook when a balloon went close by their large bedroom window.

“Our dog started barking and I couldn’t figure out why until I saw the balloon,” she said. “I ran to the window and everyone in the balloon was waving at me. I got dressed and followed the balloon until it came down, then I watched [the crew] take it all apart.”

This year, almost 60 years after she started her teaching career in Newtown and eight years after the death of her spouse, Ms Mulvihill decided it was time to fulfill her long-held dream of soaring over the earth in a hot air balloon.

“So for my special birthday—I don’t want to say which one—my children decided to give me a balloon ride. I went up with my friend, George, who will be celebrating his birthday in October,” she said. ‘The balloon was called Staircase to Heaven and it was piloted by Thadius Burr of Southbury.”

The balloon was launched from a hilltop in Roxbury while an entourage watched that included Aloise’s son, John, and his wife, Evelyn; daughter Maureen Pennarola, and daughter Rita Mulvihill and her husband, Bill Oravecz, and their children, Sarah and Andrew, plus George Dolan’s daughter, Mary, and her husband, Jeff Griffin, and Bill Oravecz’s parents, Barbara and Bill Oravez.

“It was the smoothest ride,” Aloise Mulvihill said. “[The balloon gondola] doesn’t rock. It doesn’t shake. You don’t feel like you are moving unless you look down. Even when we came down over Lake Quassapaug, it looked like the lake was coming up to meet us. It didn’t feel like we were dropping.”

“The balloon rose to a height of about 3,200 feet, and the cars below looked smaller than children’s Match Box toy cars,” she said. “Maureen said that at one time the balloon was so high it looked like a tennis ball.”

The balloon sailed across Woodbury at a top speed of 5 miles per hour. Finally the pilot told his passengers that he planned to do a “splash and dash” maneuver.

“He said he intended to come down in Lake Quassapaug—that [way] we will land in the water,” Ms Mulvihill said. “He brought the balloon down until it touched, but we couldn’t feel anything. We could only tell by the ripples in the water. Then he gave it heat, we took off and sailed over the lake.”

Above the passengers’ heads in the gondola was a bar that the pilot used to open a flap on the top of the balloon. “That releases all the air so the balloon comes straight down,” Ms Mulvihill said. “There is less sensation than touching the brake pedal in a car.”

The experience was worth all the years of anticipation, she said, “It was a big success. I would recommend it to anybody.”