Kite Flying In America - Part I

This comic mimicked an epic moment from my childhood in Detroit.  "Red & Rover" certainly put it better than I could have back in the day, but we were kindred souls.  The truly epic kite flight was the stuff of legend, and I and my friends pursued it with all the zeal an adolescent could muster.  And while our ambitions were not necessarily to fly the kite up into commercial airspace, they were - if you will pardon the pun - similarly lofty.

It was all about flying higher and farther.

We had it on good authority from some older boys in the neighborhood that there was a mystical layer of wind up somewhere between the ground and the clouds that would not only sustain your kite, but carry it many miles away once released.  Sometimes, the wind at that height would even be going in a different direction, or so we were told.  These boys were vague as to the height, as I recall.  “Twice as high as the trees” was about as specific as any of them would get, and reaching that altitude was called the Monster Flight.  Already a veteran kite flyer, I endeavored to reach that height by flying the perfect kite on the perfect day, and greatly extending my range by means of tying successive rolls of kite string together.   

Keep in mind that all prior attempts to tandem more than two rolls of string had ended in disaster.  It was 1964. 

 

I was ten years old.
 

There was a whole ritual that surrounded kite flying in my neighborhood, starting with The Build.  Boys & Girls all bought exactly the same kite available at Kresges 5 & 10 Cent Store.  It cost 79 cents, and we all got the same kind of kite because Kresges carried only the one model, and nobody else sold kites.  This turned out to be fortuitous: not only was this single model the great equalizer, but kids in the neighborhood over a generation built up a vast store of information on the  construction and flying of this model.    

The whole kit and caboodle was rolled into a tube and wrapped in plastic. The first thing you did was fish out and flatten the single sheet of paper with the instructions.  They were not instructions per se, but rather a series of pictures that showed the entire process for building your kite.  The older boy next door explained that since the kites came from Japan, and nobody there spoke English, that they had to do the instructions in pictures instead.  We all accepted this explanation because he was twelve, and thus much wiser than us.  More about him later.

The flimsy paper kite had to be carefully unrolled and flattened.  The balsa wood cross-pieces were rotated on a metal fastener that resembled an oversized paperclip until they were perpendicular to one another.  The ends of both pieces were carefully inserted into those fragile woven pockets on the four corners of the kite.  This feature in particular was fascinating to me: it seemed impossible that sewing little paper triangles onto the four corners of a paper template could possibly be strong enough to support a wooden frame, but it was.  Next you had to attach a string to the horizontal member and pull it tight so as to create the curve that tightened the paper skin of the kite against the frame.  After that, you made a pinprick hole about one third down from the top corner, fed your kite string through, and tied it to the frame. 

It sounds straightforward, but it was not.  The whole process was fraught with peril, and you had to know all the tricks not only to keep from destroying your kite, but to ensure that it would fly.  For example: I and my friends punched our hole and tied the kite string off where the two members crossed (per the instructions) until our neighborhood’s version of  Fonzie - a guy we called Sonny Boy – revealed that the best place to tie off was about one inch below the cross.  One test flight proved him to be right.  The kite got higher faster, and made much better use of the wind.  This revelation would prove to be essential in my later efforts to conclude the Monster Flight.

It didn’t end there.  We learned that it was important to adjust the cross-members on the little metal clip that held them together to ensure that they lined up exactly with the horizontal and vertical axes of the paper kite, and that you never punched the hole to feed the kite string through until after you bowed the cross piece that tightened the kite against the frame.  Otherwise, you could tear your kite before you even got off the ground.  I remember that one friend’s Dad figured to reinforce the hole with scotch tape.  We all agreed that his solution was bogus, and he was not to be trusted; and who exactly invited a Dad to be part of this process anyway? 

 

Coming up: Part II - The Tale Of The Tail