When we were kids you could go into any store and buy a swell balsa wood glider plane kit. They ranged from 5 cents to the whopping price of 50 cents! The 50 cent ones had a plastic rubber band-powered propeller that you wound up for power flight, which also included red plastic landing wheels on a wire landing gear! Only “rich kids” ever had any of these and they never let any of us play with them, thus they remained the “Holy Grail” to us common kids!  My 2 favorites were the 5-cent model, which had a red plastic holder to hold the wings on, and the 10-cent model in which you slid the wings and tail on through slots.  The red plastic slots on the 5-cent model put the wings at an angle that our 7^th grade teacher Mr. Cranston called “dihedral”. He was our “coolest teacher” and used to spend many lunch hour recesses flying our balsa planes with us. I still keep in contact with him in Florida VIA of e-mail.  I rarely see these little packets of pure fun and delight in any store these days. I guess kids now days are too busy growing up before their time and acting too adult-like and “urbane” at increasingly earlier ages. Most of us never had much extra money in those days, so when we didn’t have the money to purchase “store bought planes”, we fed our aerodynamic urges with simple “free stuff” we found literally “laying around the ground”.  The most prolific thing we did was to make paper airplanes out of our notebook paper which were exclusively the “Dart” type as seen in the below pic. I used to tear rudders and elevators behind the wings so it would either loop continuously or spin. Once and a while at home, I would set the back of the wing on fire so that it would then be a plane shot down and burning and leaving a smoking trail!  Another interesting “flying thing” we used to make was a “Frisbee” type of thing we constructed out the ubiquitous Fudgsicle or Popsicle sticks which were always laying around the ground all over the school playground and athletic field. As an aside, I sure wished they still made those turquoise-colored Popsicles, which I think were blueberry flavor or something. Man! Those were really good!!!! Also, you never see lime-flavored Popsicles anymore either, or for that matter, lime-flavored anything anymore. Most products that were green and thus always lime-flavored in the past are now “Green Apple Flavored”! YUUUUCK!!! Now days you can’t even trust the color of something to taste like limes as everything did in the past!  In addition, as long as I’m on this “side track, why don’t they make “double popsicles with 2 sticks anymore? Well, I guess compared to nuclear proliferation or the danger of any Demo”rat” being elected these days, this doesn’t rank as real high on today’s most urgent problems, but to me it does rank “somewhere up there close”! Popsicle and Fudgsicle sticks were gleaned and used to make a swell “Frisbee-type flying saucer! If you look at the pic below, I have reconstructed one! Once and a while some “kid” would construct a “super deluxe model” which was square and made of several sticks! The basic “five stick” models flew fairly well, especially if you threw them into the wind. Other free “flying things” included thin pieces of slate, which was in abundant supply in those early school days in the 1950’s. There was a big pile of it beside the old gray barn that stood on the west side of the athletic field for years. We never knew where all that slate came from, but looking back, I assume it was from some old school building they tore down years before our class started our school years. Over the years until the pile was finally removed, it kept getting smaller and smaller as we guys flew hundreds of pieces of it all over the athletic field! I figure they finally got rid of it because they were tired of picking it up all over school property! At home, other “free flying stuff” consisted of such things as old 45 records! Check out the previous story “Our Record Breaking Day” for a description of this unfortunate event! On many other occasions, I would climb up to the “barn window” and throw out individual pieces of straw, which made a really neat “plane” being shot down as it careened out of control and “crashed” from the “high altitude” of 50 feet!  Another memorable time was when Jim D. had a whole bunch of old bathroom tiles piled up at his place and we took a bunch of them home to fly in the fields. They really flew great! (Hmmmm, I was just thinking that maybe my bathroom could stand a remodeling….) In later years when we were a little older, we got into much more sophisticated “flying things” as you can read in Just “Plane” Crazy.  Looking back, I have to wonder if maybe we were better off with just the “free flying stuff”! These days, I get a never-ending supply of AOL CDs in the mail it seems like every other day. These make really good free “flying saucers” too! Our field that borders the north side of my house is gradually filling up with AOL CDs! What “they” say is indeed true, “The best things in life are free”!