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Phil Gray made his wife a promise 36 years ago that was bound to be broken right from the start.

The couple were building a home on the west side of Indianola. At the same time, Gray wanted to build a hot air balloon. He was an aspiring pilot, hobnobbing with Central Iowa enthusiasts and taking turns flying balloons that belonged to the clubs that were sprouting in the wake of a burst of popularity for the sport.

“I told her I just wanted to build one,” Gray said.

Instead, he built one house, mostly on his own. As for balloons, he has been building between two and 15 a year for nearly four decades.

“She never lets me forget it,” Gray said.

The marriage of Phil and Linda Gray is intact, and the couple still lives in the house that shared attention with a balloon.

They are co-owners of National Ballooning Ltd., a business that started in their basement and garage but has been relocated to family-owned land in Patterson, a one-blink-and-it’s-gone town about 31 miles southwest of Des Moines in Madison County.

“We are the largest aircraft manufacturer in the state of Iowa, and we are the biggest business in Patterson,” he said.

With the National Balloon Classic running this week in Indianola, Gray is a man to know. He is certified by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to manufacture, repair and inspect balloons, including their air-trapping envelopes, wicker baskets and burners that take them aloft and keep them there.

With about 100 pilots in Indianola for a week of competition, Gray provides annual inspections and is on call for an emergency patch.

A day before the balloon event kicked off, Gray was wrapping up inspections of about 20 balloons. The FAA requires balloons to be inspected every year or after 100 hours of flight time.

He pokes and prods the rip-stop nylon material, looking for rips and burns and other weak spots. The process takes a full day, and Gray charges between $250 and $300.

Gray’s involvement in the sport dates to the first appearance of balloons in Indianola, which by most accounts started in the early 1970s when a Fort Dodge attorney and balloon pilot visited his son at Simpson College and noted that an intramural sports field near a row of dormitories would make a challenging launching and landing spot.

A few pilots showed up the following year, and Gray was in attendance.

“My dad was with me, and I said, ‘Those things are beautiful; they’re so graceful,'” Gray said.

The following year, Indianola hosted the preliminary flights for the National Hot Air Balloon Championships. Gray helped with a crew for one of the pilots and was finally offered a ride.

“He said he needed some ballast,” Gray said. “That was the beginning of this terrible disease that I got.”

At the time, Gray was headed for a career change. He was a television repairman with a shop in Des Moines. He attended a seminar about solid-state televisions and realized he didn’t have a future in the business.

“You could make a pretty good living replacing tubes,” Gray said. Solid-state sets were durable, and if anything did go wrong, you just replaced the innards.

Gray began selling hot air balloons for a South Dakota company and got his pilot license. He also formed a club, the Hawkeye Aero Station Society Inc., that included about a dozen other people who fancied the burgeoning sport.

The club bought a balloon, which the members took turns flying.

But Gray wanted his own craft, hence the one-balloon promise to Linda.

Though the sport was gaining in popularity, it had few certified pilots.

“At the time, there might have been 38 pilots in the country,” Gray said. “I think there might have been 10 pilots who showed up for the first event in Indianola.”

In addition to building balloons, Gray began giving piloting lessons to help make ends meet and engaging in a little barnstorming by flying banners for various companies who wanted to advertise from the sky.

He also took up hot-air balloon racing; he placed fifth in the overall competition at the national championships.

“That racing thing gets in your blood,” he said. “I can understand why people race cars.”

But for a man who works with his hands – and needed to make a living – manufacturing was a truer calling.

Gray points out that balloon manufacturing requires the ability to work with wood, leather, metal and fabric.

He has eight industrial-grade sewing machines, with each one called to task to lay down six to eight miles of thread in order to bind the 1,300 to 1,500 cubic yards of material that go into each balloon. Manufacture of the canopy alone can take up to a month. Baskets are made of milled wicker woven around a frame of aircraft-grade aluminum.

Sewing is monotony, but weaving is pure therapy, Gray said.

“Believe me, you look forward to weaving after all that time at a sewing machine,” he said.

Gray also has developed the first FAA-certified basket for wheelchair-using passengers. He spends several weeks every year traveling the country at the invitation of communities and organizations that want to offer balloon rides to people with disabilities.

Ballooning is experiencing a slump due to the high cost of gasoline for chase vehicles, the cost of the propane that fuels the balloons and an economy that is generating little in the way of recreation dollars.

As a result, Gray has built two balloons so far this year and has pending orders for four more. Prices for the canopies alone start between $13,000 and $15,000.

All of the balloons are custom ordered. Gray and a crew that consists in large part of family members who do all of the work, including applying logos and other custom touches. He has done the mascots for Iowa State University and the University of Iowa.

“The cartoon part isn’t bad, but it’s the character that you have to get just right,” he said. “That character has a lot of fans.”