It’s springtime, 2014. The windy season. The time of the year when the cold fronts from the north fight it out with the warm fronts from the south as the earth tries to make up its mind whether its winter or summer.
It’s kite-flying season!
How many times during recent years have you see kids flying kites in your neighborhood? On a nice, windy day when I was a kid in the 1950’s there would be kites flying in any neighborhood where kids lived. Not any more.
Neighborhood Kids Flying Kites (web photo)
Where are all the kites? I still see kites for sale at Walmart but I don’t see any in the sky. Is it because of all the activities and gadgets that vie for a kid’s attention anymore that I don’t see them outside flying kites? In the 1950’s we had television, with a few stations, but no cable or satellite. We had radio, but hand-held transistor radios were still in their infancy, and very expensive. We had telephones but you were tethered to the wall with a wire. There were no cell phones to talk or text on, no electronic games, no personal computers or tablets or Internet to compete for a kid’s attention with the outdoor adventure of flying kites. There were no VCR’s or DVD’s to keep you glued to your TV, no CD players or Walkmans or MP players to steal a lid’s attention from the out-of-doors. There were strip malls, but no enclosed shopping malls with food courts in Southern California to hang out at for hours on end, looking and being seen; the first shopping mall in Southern California was still years in the future, South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa.
I would imagine that, to a kid of the 21st Century, we kids in the 1950’s were living in the Dark Ages.
But we had kites. And as spring rolled around and the wind started blowing, usually in March, we started getting excited about the annual ritual of kite flying.
In March, the start of the official kite-flying season, I would scrape together all the change I could find, turning in Coke bottles for the refund and looking behind chair and sofa cushions for loose coins. I would walk the one mile or so to the big strip mall with the Thrifty Drug Store on one end. Calling it a “drug store” is kind of a misnomer, because Thrifty Drug Stores had everything. Including kites, lots of kites of all kinds.
I only liked one kind of kite, the traditional Hi-Flier kite. Kites were cheap in the mid- to late-1950’s, maybe ten or fifteen cents or so. I would buy a couple of kites – you always needed at least one spare kite to replace the one that ends up in a tree or wrapped around a power line – and a ball of string, kite string.
Hi-Flier Kite (web photo)
Rolled-Up Kite Package (web photo)
Ball of Kite String (web photo)
A tree-lined suburban neighborhood street with its overhead power lines and rooftop TV antennas may not be the best place to fly a kite, but it was all we had, and at the time we never gave it a second thought.
My Fullerton Neighborhood Today
Once I got the kite and string home I would excitedly start putting it together. It was a fairly simple procedure: unroll the kite package, lay the kite down with the backside up, and insert the two sticks into the strings in the corners.
Putting the Sticks into the Back of the Kite (web photo)
Next I would tie a length of string between the two ends of the shorter string, making the back of the kite bow a little. Next I would tie the bridle to the front of the kite, to which the main length of kite string would be attached.
Kite with Bridle and String and Tail Attached
It was always necessary to make a tail for the kite. The tail added stability to the kite, creating drag that kept the kite upright in the wind. You didn’t want anything heavy, just something light to create the drag. For the tail I would look through the hall closet for one of my mom’s old sheets that I could tear strips from, and hoping that mom wouldn’t miss the sheet. The tail would typically be several feet long; the more wind the longer the tail would need to be. If the tail was too short the kite would sway back and forth, perhaps even looping until it nose dived in the ground – or into somebody’s backyard down the street or onto their roof, or into a tree or onto the power lines that ran through the backyards of the neighborhood. If any of that happened the kite was toast, so the proper tail was very necessary.
Flying a Kite with a Long Tail (web photo)
I never had a real kite string older, a reel with a crank; I always used a length of broom handle to wrap my kite string around. Hopefully I would still have the broom handle from the previous year, but in reality the likelihood of that was pretty slim. So I would find an old broom in the kitchen or garage and cut a piece several inches long off the end, hoping that mom and dad wouldn’t notice that the broom handle was getting shorter. Once I had the kite string wrapped around the broom handle I was ready to fly my kite!
The strength of the wind at ground level, given all the houses and trees in the neighborhood, determined how easy it would be to get the kite airborne. A decent wind meant you could just stand there in your front yard and let string out as the kite took off. The worst case was having to run down the street to try to get the kite airborne. And as I was often too anxious to get my kite in the air, I would often resort to running in the street to get it airborne.
I often went barefoot as a boy, and had to remember, despite my anxiousness to fly, to stop and put on shoes or sandals when running in the street to keep from stubbing my toes, which happened all too often and would ruin my whole day. But running to get the kit airborne didn’t always work, in which case you simply had to grudgingly accept the inevitable, go inside the house to pout and wait for a better day.
When I was about 15 years old, in 1960, I built a large airplane kite. I never liked box kites, but this was a sort of box kite with wings and tail. I didn’t really have much of an idea of what I was doing, knew nothing about aerodynamics, but built it anyway out of balsa wood sticks covered with tissue wrapping paper. It was big, with a wingspan of about five feet. My two stepbrothers and I carried it to the nearby schoolyard and tried to get it airborne. I ran and ran and ran and did actually get it into the air, but it wouldn’t stay there. There just wasn’t enough wind to keep something that big band heavy in the air. Looking back on it, though, I realize that if it had gotten airborne I don’t know if I would have been strong enough to keep control of it.
Steve’s Big Airplane Kite
Like with everything else in life, we grow up and our priorities and interests change. Eventually I got interested in other things and lost interest in flying kites, which is a shame. But I will always have the fond memories of holding onto that piece of broomstick and watching my kite soaring in the sky.
Boy Flying a Kite (web photo)
Steve on His 10th Birthday in 1955
Any comments? Write me at steve@dukeofcushingshire.com
