Balloon Sculptor Turns Jury Duty Into Big Blowout

Fred Harshberger was sitting alone at a table in the back of the jury assembly room at the Ventura County courthouse.

On all sides were other prospective jurors, good and true. They were buried in magazines, watching TV, sinking into a comfortably judicial torpor. Some were engrossed in their laptops, impatiently checking on the state of corporate America now that they’d been removed from it for a full hour and a half.

Harshberger, a Simi Valley resident who works for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, reached into a bag and pulled out a couple of balloons.

“I take them most everywhere,” he explained. “They’re the tools of my trade.”

Known professionally as “The Balloon Dude,” Harshberger is an eminent balloon-twister. He has written three books on it. He gives advanced classes in balloon sculpture at clown conventions. To win a world championship, he created a leaping dolphin, a 12-balloon diamondback rattlesnake, and his famous “Two Bears Kissing”--one balloon cunningly crafted to resemble two smooching teddy bears, sitting face to face.

After a while, the crowd in the courthouse took notice.

The Dude gave a couple of elaborate balloon animals to a clerk, who took them to the room where kids sit out custody hearings and other parental tragedies.

Then he taught a lady sitting next to him how to make the Flying Mouse.

“It’s four little bubbles--a nose, two ears, and a body, with a long skinny tail,” he said. “Stretch the tail and they go flying.”

After a while, Flying Mice were screaming through the jury assembly room as boldly as the charges and countercharges being hurled through the courtrooms upstairs.

So too did the “balloon rockets”--latex missiles 2 inches in diameter and 5 feet long, launched with the flick of a finger.

Pretty soon, most of the jurors had put aside their magazines and turned off their laptops. Their balloon crowns and alien antennae bobbing, some tried to keep 18-inch spheres aloft as long as possible, bouncing them from hand to hand across the room and back again. Others tried to stuff smaller balloons through an impromptu basketball hoop that Harshberger had built from, yes, balloons.

A serious businesswoman--the CEO of a Ventura County firm--said she’d never had so much fun on jury duty.

Courthouse staffers peered inside, bearing witness to this strangely unlitigated phenomenon of fun.

“I’ve never seen jurors have such a good time,” said Florence Prushon, a court executive who has seen her share of jurors over 23 years in the courthouse. “It was just fabulous. When we had to call a panel to go to court, they booed the clerk. They didn’t want to leave.”

In recent years, the court has a gone a long way toward making one’s civic duty a bit more palatable. Jurors can lounge in a TV room or sit outside on benches. Those with sterner work ethics can make use of phone connections for their computers. But one perk that court officials somehow had overlooked was master-guided balloon antics.

A couple of judges were summoned. Harshberger created a crown and a ball-and-chain for Presiding Judge Charles W. Campbell Jr., and a pink hat with crazy, dancing eyes for Juvenile Court Judge Brian J. Back.

Harshberger, like most of the jury prospects, didn’t wind up on a jury. But he did get a thank-you note from the court staff, with an expression of regret that they could call on him but once a year.

Of course, he never set out to be a court jester.

He made his first little balloon doggie after his divorce 16 years ago.

“It was a quality-time thing,” he said, explaining that he was merely trying to please his 4-year-old daughter.

Soon, he had fashioned every animal set out in the book he bought. Then, as they do so frequently in an unpredictable world, things ballooned.

Before he knew it, Harshberger was lecturing to the World Clown Assn.

“I have a lot of hidden talents,” Harshberger said, “but this is the only one I’ve discovered.”

Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.