Tracy introduced me to Anneke Sandel, a Dutch girl who was one of the few female balloonist of the time (she flew in the second Albuquerque Festival). I crewed for her a couple of times while she was flying the Wrangler jeans company’s promotional balloon.

As you can see from the blimp gondola photos, Tracy did beautiful basket-weaving. His innovation of wrapping the weave up and over the tops of the tanks, made them instantly recognizable.

I am wondering the same about the lakeshore photograph. I see that Karl is serving coffee to Tracy from a Mr. Coffee pot, which might indicate a photo taken close to Karl’s home in Colorado. However, I cannot think of any lakes in that area of Colorado that have white stone walls/bluffs on the shore. I met these men through my father, Jack, who was an engineer at the FAA, Southern Region, Atlanta, in charge of their certification of the original design (Firefly, was it ?) In fact, over the years of my youth, I met many of the hot air balloon pioneers…Tracy, Dodds (Bob), and Karl (and his then-wife, Lucy) at The Balloon Works in North Carolina, Mr. Picard in California, Mike Adams of Adams Aerostats in Atlanta, Tarp Head of Head Balloons, and a number of folks associated with Raven Industries.

I worked at The Balloon Works from ~1978 until Dec 1980. I got to see Tracy just before the solar eclipse in 2017. My son was a radiology resident at Johns Hopkins at the time, and he and Tracy had a conversation about Tracy’s involvement in an experiment for recapturing helium. After we got in the car to leave, my son said, “So you worked for that guy?” Yeah, I worked for Tracy Barnes. And for Dodds and Karl as well. Worked hard. It was so much fun.

Thank you, Mr. Douglass, for shedding light on this piece of history. I came across mixed information in books and while interviewing reliable sources, but most accounts leaned toward this finding: “By 1963, there were three balloon manufacturers in the country: Raven Industries, Don Piccard, and Tracy Barnes.”
I am aware that more verification is needed. As such, your input is always welcome, so please feel free to contact me at 240-426-2040. I think we are discussing a very brief period here, when the sport was still in its infancy.
I hope that others who are familiar with the 1960s era of ballooning will also lend their insights. Which one is accurate?
1) “By 1963, there were three balloon manufacturers in the country: Raven Industries, Don Piccard, and Tracy Barnes.”
2) “By mid-1960s, there were four balloon manufacturers in the country: Raven Industries, Don Piccard, Tracy Barnes, and Mark Semich.”
Hope to talk with you and anyone else familiar with the early 1960s era of hot air ballooning.
Sitara Maruf

Don Piccard was working for Raven in 1963, and did not begin making Piccard balloons until he started his own company in very late 1964 or early 1965.

Mark Semich made his first balloon in 1963, and finished two more just in time for the January 1964 Catalina Balloon Race. All three of his balloons flew in that race.