June 3, 1925: The 1st Goodyear Blimp

June 3, 1925, 100 years ago: The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company launches the Pilgrim, its 1st advertising airship, from Akron, Ohio, near the company's headquarters. It is the 1st "Goodyear Blimp."

Starting in the 1930s, airships began to be flown over sports stadiums, to provide overhead views for film cameras. In the 1960s, this grew to television cameras. In the 1970s, they began to be equipped with lighted message boards, for use in night games.

In 1975, Thomas Harris, later to write the Hannibal Lecter novels, published his 1st novel, Black Sunday. Although he used a fictional company's name for the blimp, he used a sporting event, the Super Bowl, as the plot point: He was going to have a terrorist use the blimp to explode over Tulane Stadium in New Orleans, as the Miami Dolphins played the Washington Redskins below. (That matchup had happened in 1973, at the Los Angeles Coliseum. It would happen again in 1983, also in the L.A. area, at the Rose Bowl.)

In 1977, Black Sunday was filmed, with cooperation from both Goodyear, which allowed one of its blimps to be used; and the NFL, which permitted film of Super Bowl X to be used. That game saw the Pittsburgh Steelers beat the Dallas Cowboys, 21-17, at the Orange Bowl, so the story was rewritten to take place in Miami.

In 1985, with New York Mets legend Tom Seaver, then pitching for the Chicago White Sox, going for his 300th career win against the New York Yankees, Goodyear sent a blimp to cover the event at Yankee Stadium. I was at this game, and I saw the blimp begin drifting to its left, and looked like it might crash into the left-field stands. The pilot got it going forward again, and there was no Black Sunday situation, intentional or otherwise.

Eventually, other companies began to use blimps in advertising. Over the course of 2014 to 2017, Goodyear began retiring its older non-rigid airships, and replacing them with semi-rigid airships.

Also on June 3, 1925, Bernard Schwartz was born in The Bronx. We knew him as actor Tony Curtis, ex-husband of actress Janet Leigh, and father of actress Jamie Lee Curtis.