Book-A-Day Almanac

For more than eighty years, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade has entertained Americans. For many households the viewing of the parade is as essential as eating turkey. But how did such an event come about?

In Balloons Over Broadway, author and illustrator Melissa Sweet takes readers behind the scenes of the parade as she presents the story of Tony Frederick Sarg (1880–1942). Even as a child he was fascinated with levers and pulleys and creating marionettes. Tony actually engineered a way to feed the family chickens from his bed. He’s so likeable that readers want to be his friend only two pages into the book. Personally, I need him to devise a way to let my dogs out at five in the morning.

First in London and then in New York, Tony performed with the Tony Sarg Marionettes. Eventually the biggest store on earth, Macy’s, ask him to design store windows with puppets.

Many of Macy’s workers were immigrants, and they missed their own holiday traditions of music and dancing in the streets as the holidays approached. Macy’s wanted to give them a parade and hired Tony to orchestrate it. He decided to base the event on the street carnivals and designed horse-drawn floats. Then he added bears, elephants, and camels from the Central Park Zoo. On Thanksgiving Day 1924 the first successful parade moved from Harlem to Herald Square. Every year Tony helped design new wonders—and eventually he discovered how to make huge balloons that moved along the streets.

Melissa Sweet shows all the mechanics of Tony’s puppets, and she incorporates material from Tony Sarg’s book and early ads for the parade. In an endnote, Melissa tells us how Tony became known as the father of American puppetry and traces his influence to latter practitioners such as Jim Henson.

Today, as more than 40 million people watch the newest Macy’s day parade, I hope that some of them read this book—and pay tribute to Tony Sarg. A fabulous combination of brilliant art and intriguing text, Balloons Over Broadway reminds us that so many of the things that we take for granted actually have a long and fascinating history.

Here’s a page from Balloons Over Broadway: