One of the many things you don’t see anymore these days are kids flying kites. I guess if it doesn’t have a joy stick or a key board, kids aren’t interested in it. When I was a kid, every Spring starting in March, the stores would all have kites out on display. Every year we kids would eagerly anticipate this “Rite of Spring”. The kites were rolled up in cellophane wrappers and hung from pegboards with metal hooks in all the stores. We always bought ours at the “Locker Plant” in Berlin Heights. The kites were 10 cents and the spool of kite string was another 10 cents. They also had box kites for a quarter, but we rarely bought any of those due to the expense and they were too complicated to assemble. The kites were made of paper and there were a great variety of colors and patterns to choose from. Two patterns I recall were a “Man in the Moon” face with a black background, and the other was small white stars on a dark blue background. When we got home, we tore open the bag and started assembly. This entailed unrolling the kite and pivoting the balsa supports attached in the middle with a metal staple that allowed the top short support to make a “T” shape. At the end of each balsa support was a notch to insert the support into a string. Since there was tension on the supports, the last notch was often difficult to insert. Once in a great while, while trying to do this, the balsa support would snap and break and ten cents was “down the drain”! We had to tie a piece of kite string between the short supports to maintain the tension and have a place to attach the string. Sometimes we would forget to put a tail on it and when we tried to fly it, it would spin rapidly around and around as we ran with it to try to get it airborne. The same thing also happened even when we did remember to attach a tail and it was too short. The material for the tails came from a rag box under the kitchen sink. The tails were made from several rags, resulting in all kinds of colors. Hey, we didn’t care what it looked like; we were just interested in flying it. When I was a kid, I never understood why a kite needed a tail, since none ever came with the kite. A few years later, I realized the tail was required to stabilize the kite by adding weight to keep it upright. One ball of kite string was never enough for us because we wanted to get our kites really high. We’d buy several balls of string. As one ran out, we’d tie another one on the end. The whole idea was to get the kite as high and far away as we could. They had red plastic reels with a handle to hold and retrieve the string during and after flight. We never used one of these because there was only enough room for one ball of string, and after the string always broke during flight, we NEVER retrieved it!

 

Our Uncle Ned told us about the time when he and our father were kids, they built a really big box kite and flew it at night with a lighted lantern hanging from the tail! Tim and I always figured this was just a story and never actually happened. However, we did both entertain thoughts of building our own using 2 X 4’s for the superstructure! If we had, it surely would have taken a truck going at least 60 miles per hour to launch it and a hurricane to keep it airborne, if it ever got airborne at all! When you’re kids, you don’t know about the laws of physics. Although on some occasions, it’s a good thing we didn’t because some of the things we did defied those laws! 

 

One day we went for a kite height record. We tied several balls of string together and the kite was so high and far away, that it was a just a small speck in the sky. The further away and higher it got, the harder it was to hold onto the string, especially on windy days. Invariably, the string broke and the kite tumbled down somewhere in the distance. Usually this would happen over Berlin Heights. The ¾ of a mile or so of string would be draped all over the ground, trees, electric and phone lines, house roofs, the road, etc. In all the times that happened, we never heard from anyone about being in trouble. I’m sure they all thought, “There’s only 2 kids that could cause a mess like this!” In time, of course, the string dissolved or as they say these days, it biodegraded. Looking back, I wonder how many lawnmowers got tangled up with string. Oh, well, another “Rite of Spring” as long as we were around!