When Grandma Was A Little Girl - #47

47-Kites and box kites – Higher! Higher! Higher!

When I was little, we made our own kites to fly. Have you ever made your very own kite? It’s fun!

Since we didn’t have a lot of extra money to spend, we were resourceful. We would buy a kite and then we made a pattern off of it (after it had crashed to the ground!) and make our own kite. The store bought kites we had were made of paper and so if they got caught in a tree, the kite was pretty much wrecked!
I loved to see how high the kite would go up in the sky. Sometimes we put an extra long tail on the kite.

My brother Geoffrey liked to build box kites. He was probably about 15 years old at the time. They were the shape of an oblong box. He started out with small box kites and they flew very well! He would use balsa wood because it was sturdy but lightweight. You had to use lightweight material so it would fly. If you used heavy wood it wouldn’t fly. Geoffrey likes to think ‘BIG!’ So he decided to make a box kite that was about five feet tall! He was quite skilled when he built things. He got all the materials and built his BIG box kite. You have to have ‘wind’ for kites to fly. He waited and there was enough wind. He would have us hold the kite up, it took two for that size of kite, and he would run as fast as he could and ‘up’ it went! It was quite something to see it fly! He used nylon string to fly it. Most of our kites just had cotton string. Cotton string can knot and get tangled. The kids in the neighborhood would be in awe to see that big kite fly. He would fly the kite in an empty field next to our house. Kids would try to throw rocks at it and jump up and touch it. He wouldn’t let it get that low for them to do any damage to it. Geoff had a lot of fun building kites.

He also had another fascination. He liked to build T.V. antennas and the ‘bigger the better’. He would build them from aluminum pipes that were the thickness of your fingers. Back when I was growing up you had to have a T.V. antennae in order for your T.V. to get any reception. Today you just hook up to a cable network. The problem with antennae was stability. If you have a strong windstorm, they were often blown down, bent or damaged. Geoff built them and put them on poles that would take a cyclone to blow them down! He believed in ‘over the top!’ He built them to last for a long time! My dad and mom would get after him about building ‘too big’!