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Our American Stories

Balloons Over Broadway: The American Visionary Who Created the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade Balloons

Our American Stories

iHeartPodcasts

Documentary, Society & Culture

4.6817 Ratings

🗓️ 27 November 2025

⏱️ 20 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On this episode of Our American Stories, Tony Sarg never set out to become the quiet genius behind one of America’s most cherished traditions, yet his imagination is the reason Thanksgiving morning feels like magic. Long before millions tuned in to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, Sarg was busy turning puppetry, engineering, and whimsy into something completely new. His early window displays for Macy’s were so inventive that the store asked him to help shape their holiday parade, and that’s where his upside-down puppets took flight. What we now think of as giant parade balloons began as sketches from a playful mind that loved solving problems and delighting crowds.

Here to tell the story is Deborah Sorensen, Curator of Exhibitions at the Nantucket Historical Association, where their exhibition Tony Sarg: Genius at Play is the first comprehensive exhibition exploring the life of Tony Sarg.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

This is an I-Heart podcast.

0:02.5

Guaranteed human.

0:13.8

And we continue with our American stories.

0:18.0

Everyone's in New Yorker on Thanksgiving Day when young and old rise early to see what

0:23.7

giant new balloons will fill the skies for Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. Our next story is about

0:31.0

the man who first invented these upside down puppets. His name, Tony Sarg.

0:40.0

Here to tell the story is Deborah Sorensen,

0:44.3

curator of exhibitions at the Nantucket Historical Association, where their exhibition, Tony Sarg, genius at play,

0:49.2

is the first comprehensive exhibition exploring his life.

0:53.8

Let's take a listen to the story.

0:57.9

Tony Sarg is a really remarkable early 20th century commercial artist and entrepreneur who was born

1:06.1

in Guatemala to a family that was a German father, an English mother in 1880.

1:11.6

And whenever he was around seven years old, they moved back to Germany

1:16.6

and where he could attend a military school.

1:19.6

He inherited a number of toys from his grandmother, who was also an artist,

1:25.6

quite well known, Mary Ellen Best. She is a remarkable watercolorist.

1:30.7

And so as a child, he loved playing with her marionettes and mechanical toys and always just had a

1:38.6

fascination with how things worked and were put together, had a very mechanical mind, but was also very artistic.

1:45.6

So he kind of blended these two halves of kind of the right

1:49.0

and left brain of being very technical, but also very creative.

1:54.0

Whenever he was a teen and actually was commissioned

1:57.5

as a lieutenant in the German army, he was always sketching. He was self-taught.

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