Kite Flying - Dave’s Midwestern Ohio Memories

A Series of Guest Blogs by an out-of-state Fish Report reader originally from this area about fond memories of growing up in Midwestern Ohio during the 50’s & 60’s

Kite Flying

This is the time of year in the spring as kids growing up on the farm that we'd always fly kites. I’d save my allowance to buy an American Flyer kite , which meant it had to be assembled, with two sticks making up the frame, paper with the flag design on it to cover the frame and a roll of string. The makeshift tail was created from old rags, the length of which had to be varied depending on the strength of the wind.

The wind each spring would generally be strong enough to fly even old rickety kites, but also typically gusty so the kite sometimes would come crashing to the ground and break apart. That meant getting the duct tape out to make the repairs and trying to get the repaired kite to fly again. So eventually it finally was beyond repair and not wanting to spend my valuable allowance money on another kite, I went about trying to make a kite from scratch using tree branches and newspaper.

Needless to say, these homemade kites never flew quite as well as the original, so soon we lost interest as the weather improved and the winds died down. Besides, it was time for spring time chores around the farm, and more importantly, baseball!

I do recall one year having enough allowance money to splurge on a box kite, which for some reason unbeknownst to me to this day, seemed to fly better than a conventional kite. It could fly really high to the point where there was not enough string, so we’d patch another roll to the kite and let it fly out further. That meant the string took forever to roll up, so we created a kite winder out of wood from scratch to more quickly bring in our kites.

One year, I recall we hung the kite winder over a fence post and let the kite fly all night. To our astonishment, it was still flying strong in the morning but the wind had shifted so it was flying right over the barn barely clearing the lightening rods on the roof!

Speaking of lightening rods, Ben Franklin was undoubtedly the most famous kite flyer of all time. As we learned in grade school history (hope they still teach that story), back on June 10, 1752, during a thunder storm, ole Ben flew a kite with a brass key hanging on the string acting as a conductor to prove that lightening is made up of electrical energy which can flow through a conductor made up of the wet string and key. The experiment was successful and fortunately did not kill Franklin, as he had other things to accomplish later in life. Click on this link for more interesting information on Ben Franklin and his research.