Kite Meadow

During my childhood I got used to yearly outbreaks of what our family called "August Madness." There was nothing harmful or really crazy about it. It was simply an excess of boredom because there was no school or university to attend or teach in August. So my father would get really involved in a short-lived hobby or pastime. The Madness for 1960 was building and flying kites. Kites were always available in "variety" stores, narrow colorful paper and sticks tightly rolled along with a ball of string. You assembled the crackly paper rhomboid (or geometrical "kite form") bent into a bow, added a tail of fabric scraps, and sent it to the wind. These paper and twig kites usually didn't last more than one outing, since the construction was delicate and could not withstand gusty winds.

So my father decided to build the Mighty Kite, an aerial sail that could rise into the heavens. He built a wood framework and a cloth swath to catch the wind. Then he built a cube-shaped wooden open box winder to hold the kite string. My father was a musician and composer but he was also good at working with wood and furniture. The kite string caddy looked like an old-style camera but it was just wood and string. When the Mighty Kite (that wasn't its real name, but I'll call it that since I don't remember the real one) was ready, we tried it out in our back yard. The kite failed to fly but we attributed that to lack of wind.

We put it to sail in what I think was late August, just before the New England climate sank into autumn. Our air trial took place on an empty, grass-covered lot on a nearby hill, not too far away from the site of the destroyed Moore House. The personnel were my father, myself, a neighbor boy named Robert Dunlay, and possibly my mother to take the photographs. In the image above you see Robert, my father holding the kite, and me in the meadow, holding the fabric-scrap tail of the kite. It is still warm enough so that we don't need coats. The grass was probably summer-gold; unfortunately I don't have any color memories of this. There is a kind of Wyeth look to this little scene; a sunny but faded meadow of long grass, New England trees and people, with one little girl looking directly at a viewer 60 years later.

We had a good wind and launched the Mighty Kite into it. The cloth contraption rose slowly into the air as we pulled frantically at the string. It fluttered and was not stable. The kite couldn't fly, no matter what we did. It would rise to about a height of ten or twenty feet, and then stall there, keeping the line parallel to the ground, and then it would drop back into the grass. All of us were terribly disappointed, as we tried and tried to get our project off the ground. Finally we had to admit failure. The structure of the Mighty Kite was just too heavy to sustain the lift of the wind.

The remains of the kite and its line-winder stayed in our endlessly cluttered garage for years afterward. New kite designs appeared in the stores which were of lightweight plastic, in the forms of bats and birds and fantasy creatures. I flew one of those black bat kites with great success. Our access to the air now is more complex with drones and remote cameras. Soon afterwards the meadow was replaced with large houses which are still there, enjoying the view from the hill.

Original image is 2" x 3", about 1960. Click for a larger view.