CDZ Kites

[MaryL]

Anybody remember the old balsa stick tissue kites they used to sell come early spring at the five and dimes? And the artwork they had on them?

 

[Natural Citizen]

Yeah. I think so. They had real wood sticks? Those ones?

Haven't heard the words five and dime in decades. Gosh. I'm getting old.

 

[MaryL]

Flying kites was a art. Friends and family were greatly skilled and could fly a kite to great heights. But the art on them, its lost too.

 

[MarathonMike]

Anybody remember the old balsa stick tissue kites they used to sell come early spring at the five and dimes? And the artwork they had on them?

I don't remember the art work but I remember finally getting one way up the in air after a 100 failed attempts. That was so cool!

 

[Dekster]

Anybody remember the old balsa stick tissue kites they used to sell come early spring at the five and dimes? And the artwork they had on them?

Yep. I found one in some off the wall store in college and was out trying to figure out how to fly the thing. This ancient battleaxe prof in whose class I was doing miserable saw me, came over and we talked for a couple hours with her telling me about the growing up in the good old days and crap when they made their own kites and I went from a D student to an A student for the rest of the semester. Frosty's old silk hat isn't the only thing with magic in it.

 

[eagle1462010]

Yup........remember them........but I liked it when they changed them up to look like bats......and used to tied stuff to them and have air to air combat with the kites........

Of course our kites didn't last long after that. LOL

 

[MaryL]

Chinese kites predate modern airplanes. It's amazing really. Flight began in China...

 

[MaryL]

1903. Wright brothers. Powered flight, that's different thing though. Kites were flown in China millennia ago.

 

[MaryL]

The art of the 50's

 

[HenryBHough]

And they're fun!

 

[MaryL]

Kites in the 50s had this certain artistic esthetic. Paper, yes. sticks. yes Flimsy, yes....Sold at every REXAL near you. Yes.

 

[MaryL]

I would love to see old kite artwork of the 50s or 60s, if you have them.

 

[MaryL]

Anybody remember the old balsa stick tissue kites they used to sell come early spring at the five and dimes? And the artwork they had on them?

I don't remember the art work but I remember finally getting one way up the in air after a 100 failed attempts. That was so cool!

I once had a relative flew a kite so high, it blew me away. She blew me away, in 1972.

 

[Bob Blaylock]

Anybody remember the old balsa stick tissue kites they used to sell come early spring at the five and dimes? And the artwork they had on them?

Yes, I remember those. But the sticks were not balsa. Balsa would not have been strong enough.

Balsa is typically used to make model airplanes. It's used for this application, because it is very light, compare to most woods, but it's also not very strong, so it requires fairly complex constructions to achieve a sturdy, but lightweight structure.

Interestingly, balsa is classified as a hardwood. The distinction between hardwoods and softwoods actually has nothing to do with relative hardness or softness. On looking things up, to be sure of what I thought I remembered from my botany classes of a several decades ago, I find that hardwood is defined as wood that comes from dicotyledonous angiosperm trees, while softwood is wood that comes from gymnosperm trees.

This left me to wonder how wood was classified that came from monocotyledonous angiosperm trees. It turns out that monocots don't generally produce usable wood, even when they take a tree form (such as palm trees), so what wood-like material they do produce is not classified as either hardwood nor softwood, and is barely, if at all, considered wood.

 

[Bob Blaylock]

But yes, I remember the old kites, with wooden sticks. Originally, the classic diamond kites, and later, bat-shaped kites.

Somewhere along the way, the wooden sticks gave way to hollow plastic sticks.

One thing that I occasionally think I'd like to recreate, some day, is what I dubbed “The Kite From Hell”. A big, ugly motherf•••er of a kite. It was of a configuration that I knew as a “dogsled kite”, about six feet tall by about five feet wide. I made it with two bamboo sticks, two garbage bags, some duct tape, and a spool of 500-pound-test fishing line. It usually attracted a fair amount of attention when I got it out and flew it, and if there were other people in the area flying kites, mine was always the biggest and most impressive.

 

[candycorn]

Down in Port Aransas (TX), they were flying Kites when I was down there a few weeks ago before the lock down. A lot of skilled people. But you don't see kids flying kites often much any more.

 

[Chuz Life]

I used to make my own kites (using a book from the library). My favorite was the one I made, using my Farrah Fawcett poster.

I messed up though. When I cut out the basic shape of the kite, she was upside down. LOL, I flew it anyway.

 

[CWayne]

We used to make our own kites. Mostly the diamond-shaped ones because we were kids and our engineering skills we pretty basic.

My dad used to make a box-kite that amazingly enough flew really well. Looked like this, but without the colors of course.

 

[CWayne]

Here we go. Pretty much like this.




Although, truthfully. We use to just make a cross with some sticks and then outline the diamond with string. We'd fold the paper over the string and then glue it. Of course, you had to make your kite the night before flying.

Actually, this is closer to what we used to do as kids.

 

[CWayne]

Anybody remember the old balsa stick tissue kites they used to sell come early spring at the five and dimes? And the artwork they had on them?

Thank you for bringing back some wonderful memories I have of my childhood.