The Hi-Flier Kite Company

a Remembrance by Jeff Duntemann

Ask me what I know about Decatur, IL, and I'll tell you that that's where Hi-Flier kites come from. Came from, at least, in the era when I was an ardent consumer of kites. This was from about 1961 to 1966, roughly when I was in third through eighth grade, on the Northwest Side of Chicago, near Talcott Road and Canfield, right on the border with Park Ridge.

I say “consumer” of kites because that's how it worked: I saved up a dime, bought a kite down at Bud's Talcott Hardware Store at Talcott and Harlem, and flew it until I destroyed it, which was anywhere from five minutes to five days after standing up in Edison School yard and committing my doomed possession to the Windy City winds. The poor kites were doomed because we flew them too near the trees that grew in the parkway around the school yard, we flew them in winds too strong for the string we had, and we flew them with second-hand string that other kids had left lying around in the grass on the schoolyard.

So, all things considered, it was a good thing that most kites cost only 10 cents.

As for Hi-Flier kites, well, we flew them not because of any strong brand loyalty, but because that's what Bud stocked in his hardware store, and Talcott Hardware was the closest source of kites we had. I knew of TopFlite kites, but those could only be had at exotic places like Walgreen's that you had to take a car to get to. (Bud is still alive, by the way, though he's gotten pretty old and his children now run the store, the third generation to do so. As often as not I laid my dime down on the counter for one of his parents.)

Anyway. Hi-Flier as a brand name is still alive, but the company in Decatur, IL is long gone. A company called Galoob Toys now owns the trademark, making plastic deltas now under the Hi-Flier name. It's unclear when the Decatur operation ceased, but the paper kite business is extinct in this age of plastic. Even the promo kites that used to be Hi-Flier's bread and butter are now made of plastic, in China. (And they fly like crap, sorry. I have one here. Hi-Flier, dammit, we miss ya!)

I've often wondered what Decatur is like, now and 35 years ago when I was a Hi-Flier customer. As a kid I always envisioned a small town with a brick main street out in the Great Nothing of the central Illinois prairies, with a railroad track and grain elevators on the far side of town, and a very wide sky that always had a few kites in it.

The Three Species

OK. There were three kite different designs in the Hi-Flier canon during the time I flew them. Two are well known, and the third I have seen only once, probably in 1966. Here's the summary:

The classic two-stick diamond bow kite

 These were made in two sizes and two materials. There was a smaller size that sold in paper for 10 cents, and a larger size in paper that sold for 15 cents. The smaller size was also available in plastic, for a quarter.

The paper box kite

These cantankerous, fragile, and short-lived beauties cost fifty cents.

The three-stick six-sided flat paper kite

 I saw exactly one specimen in the hands of a boy near my parents' summer home at Third Lake, IL, in '65 or '66. It was made by Hi-Flier, and unless I misrecall, it had the word “Rainbow” on it, along with a colorful rainbow motif. The kite was fairly small, and the poor kid had no luck getting it in the air. He told me he got it free when his dad bought him a pair of shoes in Grayslake.

And that's it! If there any additional types I never saw them.

The 10 Cent Kites

These were my favorites. Two coke bottles found in an empty lot could be returned at the C&T Certified at Canfield and Talcott (around the corner from Bud's hardware store) and generate funds to buy one. I remember two designs and two only:

1. The “Playmates of the Clouds.” These were one-color on white paper, often black but I remember having them in blue and magenta inks. The design had a futuristic flying wing aircraft in the center, above the name “Hi-Flier.” They fascinate me because the ones I bought always had biggish numbers on them below the logo. I remember having one with the a number as small as 6, and as high as 94. Interestingly, I saw one on E-bay recently that had the words “Little Boy” in place of the numbers.
2. The American Shield kites. These were the same size, but more colorful, and lots of kids seemed to be flying them after the Fourth of July. I couldn't sketch one anymore, but they were red, white, and blue, with stars and stripes and a shield.

The 10 cent Hi-Fliers were wonderful flyers. In most Chicago winds that we dared fly in, they would fly tailless with very little trouble. In fact, on a dare I tried flying one upside-down by pulling the bridle tie point way down the bridle string and flipping it over. Worked fine! It looked like an arrow, and the other kids thought I was pretty clever to have pulled it off. Most of them never mastered kite flying, generally because they persisted in tying entire bedsheets off the bottom stick and wondering why the damned things couldn't get off the ground.

The 15 Cent Kites

I don't remember these as well, because I only flew a couple. One of my friends preferred them. He was smart, and figured out (as most kids never did) that a bigger kite would fly in less wind. I didn't like them because they cost another redeemed bottle to buy, and once in the air it was impossible to tell that they were any bigger than my Playmates of the Clouds. And at the rate I wrecked kites (and with plenty of competition for scavenged bottles) it seemed an unwarranted profligacy.

The Plastic Bow Kites

These cost a quarter, and when I had quarters—which wasn't often—I bought better things than kites. I remember flying a couple with my cousin Ron down in Blue Island. Ron was always spoiled and had the best toys, including the biggest Erector set I ever saw. The Hi-Flier plastic bow kites, as far as I knew, had only one design: A Flash-Gordon style spacecraft with the legend “Orbiteer.” I think they came in different color schemes, though. The one I remember most clear was mostly magenta with blue highlights.

The Box Kites

I lusted after these, and every so often (usually after Aunt Kathleen had given me a dollar for no good reason) I would buy one. They had a very simple art design: Just colored paper with relatively small drawings of spaceships and helicopters and things. The physical design was diabolical: Each end was kept at very high tension by two cross-sticks that were slightly too long to fit inside the paper box portion, and had to bow a little. The paper was thus tight as a drum, and tore very easily.

But they flew like demented birds of prey, swooping and zipping around at incredible speeds, pulling tremendously hard, almost always on the edge of being out of control. Flying one was the first adrenaline rush I can clearly recall. Each represented a lot of kid-capital, and having seen plenty of them die at other kids' hands, there was a lot of anxiety in trying to get them to rise and sit still.

Sit still? Hah. No chance. Not even by me, who considered his twelve-year-old self a black-belt kitemaster. In the strange divided drafts that beset the too-small Edison schoolyard, they flew like crazed eagles, often for no more than a few seconds before diving full-speed straight down from seventy feet in the air and exploding into sticks and shreds in the muddy spring grass.

As I got to be twelve and thirteen, I justified the expense of Hi-Flier box kites because after they crashed, I could scavenge the sticks and build bow kites with the sticks. An unbroken stick was the vertical, and a broken stick (always at one of the two notches about 3” from the ends) became the bow stick. I covered them with newspaper, which tore a lot, but was free and abundant in the basement. Eventually I could strip the paper from a kite and re-string and re-paper it inside of five minutes, although I was covered with mucilage by the time I was done. Not that I cared. (Does anybody even remember mucilage, and the smushy flesh-colored noses on the bottles that you used to spread the goop on the paper flaps around the edges of your kite?)

I tried to make a small square flat kite from two of the spreader sticks once, but could never get it into the air. Small kites take a lot of air, as I learned after awhile.

The Promo Kites

I didn't know it at the time, but Hi-Flier must have done a tremendous business in promo kites, by which I mean the small-sized two-stick paper kites on which a business would print its own design and give them to kids as promotional items. The number of such kites to appear on E-bay is completely incredible. Jif peanut butter, Sinclair and Texaco, various local businesses and radio stations; it's amazing. Most of the kites to come to auction were promos. I have one myself; a Big Boy Fan Club kite that literally sat stuck in my mother-in-law's basement rafters for thirty years before we pulled it out and flew it in 1995.

That's about all I remember about Hi-Flier kites. I don't know when the paper kite era came to an end; I would guess the mid or late Seventies.

Other Products

Hi-Flier sold a couple of other things as well. They sold branded kite line, but it looked like everybody else's light cotton package twine and I suspect it was just a private label thing. The best Hi-Flier product apart from kites, however, was their Spinwinder. I never had one, but I watched a kid use one once, and it made winding string around a lumpy stick look pretty sick by comparison. 

The device was a spool with a handle, and through the handle was threaded a metal rod that bent into a crank at the bottom, and at the top into a loop that curved down level with the spool. You wound your line on the spool, and then threaded it just so over the bar and through a loop on the end to your kite. As you cranked the handle, the rod spun around and wound in your kite, placing your line neatly and tightly on the spool! The only downside was that letting line out in a hurry was problematic, which is why I still use a "hose-reel" style reel when I fly. I have a couple of pictures of the Spinwinder below, and it remains a pretty cool gadget. 

I vaguely recall a very simple bent-wire winder that was much cheaper, but I'm not sure if it was a Hi-Flier product.

I would like to hear any more information that you have on HiFlier, or pictures of their products. Send them to jeffd@coriolis.com