KITES

When I was a small boy living in Beaver City Nebraska in the 1940’s you had to make your own kite. They didn’t sell them in the stores.

The first stop was the lumberyard to buy two wooden dowels (long round rods). They were ¼" across and about 36" long. Then a stop at either the butcher shop or the general dry goods store to ask for some heavy wrapping paper from their big counter top rolls. If you didn’t have string, it was off to the hardware store to buy a cone of string. Mom, being forewarned, had made up a bunch of flour and water white paste.

The first task was to cut one of the wooden dowels to 2/3 the size of the other one. Then each end got a notch cut into it for the string to go through. The next task was to find the exact center of each dowel and carve out a small round indent where the two would cross on the shorter one and about halfway between the center and the end on the other. This juncture was then tightly tied together forming a cross.

String was then placed through the notches on the ends of the dowels and tied tightly creating a string around the circumference of the cross.

Laying the cross on the heavy paper, a line was drawn about two inches outside of the string. The paper was cut along the line and fitted to the cross by folding the extra paper over the string. This extra fold was then pasted over the string and to the rest of the paper. Then books were piled on all the pasted parts to get a solid seal.

Later guide strings forming a three-sided triangle were attached to the top three arms of the cross and a tail made of string and rags was attached to the bottom.

With a good wind and expert adjustment of the tail and how the string was tied to the guides, you had the best kite in town!