Meet the master of balloons

COSTA MESA, Calif. — Treb Heining's head is full of balloons. For 35 years, he's invented them, shaped them and sold them.

About 1,200 of his balloons covered the field at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum during the opening ceremony for the 1984 Olympics. About 4,000 framed the now-infamous dance by Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake at this year's Super Bowl.

Heining, 50, tried to get away from balloons when they drove him to the brink of exhaustion, but like an artist with an obsession, he has no choice. They are his life, whether he likes it or not.

Over the years, Heining has taken balloons from birthday parties and bar mitzvahs and turned them into large-scale entertainment productions spectacular enough for three Guinness World Records, the Hollywood elite and a Saudi prince.

"Each balloon gives off its own joy," Heining said. "When you have thousands of them, it adds that much more happiness."

Heining is considered the father of balloon art in the industry, said Dan Flynn, chief operating officer of Pioneer Balloons, the largest latex-balloon manufacturer in the United States. He invented balloon arches and columns and turned an occasional balloon tied to a chair into a super-size art form, Flynn said.

Balloons have energy, Flynn said. They have freedom, motion and intensity in a way that static decorations such as flowers can't muster.

"Balloons have phenomenal play value as a child," Flynn said. "As an adult, the meaning of that playfulness is conjured up as decor."

Heining has a lot of the bouncy playfulness of balloons in him.

Ask him to blow up a balloon, and his eyes glimmer behind stainless-steel framed glasses. He won't just blow up one; he'll blow up many to show how fast he is. It's a skill he picked up at Disneyland as a teenage balloon salesman where the sellers would challenge each other to see who could blow up balloons the fastest.

But Heining didn't build his balloon career on playfulness. He built it on perfectionism.

"My dad told me that it takes two seconds to be a genius and the rest is follow-through," Heining said. "Everything I did in life, I did the best I possibly could."

When he holds the pink, blue, yellow, red, purple, orange and green balloons he's selling, he's constantly tugging on the strings, making sure they form a perfect, even, rainbow of an umbrella over his head.

Heining's balloon obsession began in 1969, at age 15, when he got his first job at Disneyland. He grew up in neighboring Garden Grove, and his childhood, and his sense of imagination, were shaped by the amusement park.

"I could hear the sound of the steamboat whistle every night as I drifted off to sleep," he said.

Disneyland is also where Heining came up with the idea to thread a paper clip through the lips of four balloons and stack the groups of four balloons on a string. The balloon column was born, eventually becoming the balloon arch. He was 16 or 17.

While in school, Heining worked for Wally Amos in his cookie store on Sunset Boulevard and later in the cookie factory, supervising the baking of the Famous Amos cookies. He also began delivering dairy products to the surrounding neighborhoods. The routes allowed him inside the homes of Bob Hope, Jimmy Stewart and Rock Hudson as he stocked their fridges with milk and yogurt. Hanging out in the kitchens of the stars eventually led to the connections to decorate birthday parties and movie premieres.

"Word of mouth spread," Heining said. "I got a reputation for doing unusual things."

There were glitzy movie premieres such as Stephen Spielberg's "1941," birthday celebrations, even parties at the Playboy mansion.

"I never had any problems getting a crew for those jobs," Heining said.

Heining was working every day. He had crews to help him, but he'd meet with the customer on location and custom-design the balloon creations. Then he'd be on site with his crew, blowing up balloons on the day of the event.

"I did so many events I often didn't know who it was for until I got there," Heining said.

Word of mouth eventually reached the ears of the 1984 Olympic committee in Los Angeles. Heining was hired to decorate the opening ceremony. He used a tanker truck of helium to fill 400 golden balloons that formed the Olympic rings on the stadium field, and the surrounding 800 white balloons. As soon as the cameras were turned on, Heining's grand-scale balloons were brought into millions of living rooms around the world.

The worldwide reaction still makes Heining teary-eyed.

"The balloons were on the front page of every newspaper," Heining said. "It made people think of balloons in a whole other way."

While the Olympics put Heining in the newspapers, two years later his grand balloon ideas put him in the record books. He earned his first entry in the Guinness World Records in 1982 for the most balloons released at one time. It was set at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas and involved 200,000 balloons. The second was in 1985 and was the first time a million balloons were released at once. It was at Disneyland during the celebration of Walt Disney's 84th birthday.

The third was in Cleveland, where Heining released 1.4 million balloons during a 1986 fund-raiser for the United Way.

After 15 Super Bowl halftime shows, five Academy Awards shows and numerous political conventions, the round-the-clock work finally caught up with Heining in the early 1990s.

He dismantled his company, took a job as a sales representative for Pioneer Balloon in Wichita, Kan. It was during his years at Pioneer that Heining invented the glasshouse balloon. He fingered samples of these transparent nylon balloons sent from Japan and came up with the idea to make them big enough to fit a regular latex balloon inside. The result: An unusual looking balloon that doesn't fade and won't deflate for at least one week, Heining said.

Slowly, he also began getting back into the balloon-decorating business, focusing on fewer but larger events.

In 1992, Heining began working with the organizers of the New Year's Eve celebration in Times Square in New York.

That event has grown to include a crew of 70 people who pass out hats and wigs and throw 4,000 pounds of confetti from the surrounding rooftops.

"I'm known as the confetti king over there," he said. "We are the largest group of sober people in New York that night."

For now, Heining is content. But his entrepreneurial brain keeps spinning out ideas for new projects.

"I don't have a new invention in mind at the moment," he said. "But I know another one will come."