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 1960 to 1966, roughly when I was in second 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 Maday's Talcott Hardware Store at Talcott and Canfield, and flew it until I destroyed it, which was anywhere from five minutes to five days after standing up in the Edison School yard and committing my doomed possession to the Windy City's erratic 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 damp grass.

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, and Alox kites, but those could only be had at exotic places like Walgreen's that you had to take a car to get to. Bud passed away in 2005, and his children decided to close the store in the summer of that year, after 55 years in business. I was honored to receive the last kite to go out the door at Talcott Hardware, though it was not a Hi-Flier.

The Hi-Flier Kite Company was founded by Harvey A. Sellers (1889-1976) in his Decatur, Illinois, basement. He got started by purchasing a patent to a bow kite from a Decatur inventor named Arthur W. Cash (US Patent # 1452956) and later that same year patented a barn-door kite in his own name. (US Patent #1453287, at right.) These two kite designs were the core of his business while production remained in Decatur. I've heard that Sellers (or the company) later obtained a patent on the Hi-Flier box kite, but I've been unable to find the patent. Sellers' son, Harvey A. Sellers, Jr, was granted a patent on a "gliding kite" in 1965 that may have been marketed as the "Glite" in the late 1960s. I had one, and the stick scheme looks familiar. The bow kite patent date (1923) was printed on virtually every Hi-Flier bow kite ever made, and a lot of supposedly savvy antiques people believe that this indicates when the kite was manufactured. Not so—most surviving Hi-Flier kites date back to the late 50s at best. I've seen only a few older ones.

The Hi-Flier Kite Company did very well, and was selling twenty million kites a year at a time when there were only seven million kids of kite-flying age in the country. Sellers understood the nature and economics of paper kites when he said that "...a kite not caught in a tree is like an ice-cream cone not eaten." By making them inexpensive, he knew his little "consumers" would just go back to the dime store and buy another when the trees took their inevitable due. (Quoted from this.)

Anyway. Hi-Flier as a brand name is still alive, but the company in Decatur, IL is long gone. I've had a hard time determining who actually owns the treademark today. A company called Damon Industries made plastic delta kites under the Hi-Flier name at one time and may have owned the trademark. Damon used to own Estes Model Rockets of Penrose, Colorado, but sold Estes to a group of investors in the early 1990s. Estes still sells a high-altitude (1600') model rocket called the Hi-Flier, though this is probably a holdover from the days when Damon owned the company. Another company called Galoob Toys (now owned by Hasbro) used to make kites (at least, I think it was kites) under the Hi-Flier name. Someone is selling Hi-Flier marbles, of all things, though I don't know who. I'm still actvely researching this issue, and will update this essay whenever I discover something significant. I intend at some point to fly down to Decatur from Chicago for a day or two and dig around in the public library there, which may turn up some interesting things.

It's unclear when Hi-Flier's Decatur operation ceased (I think the late 1980s) but the paper kite business in general is now long extinct. Even the ad/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 40 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.

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:

1. The classic two-stick diamond bow kite. These were made in three sizes and two materials. The two smaller sizes sold in paper for 10 cents, and a larger size in paper sold for 15 cents. The smallest size was also available in plastic, for a quarter.
2. The paper box kite. These cantankerous, fragile, and short-lived beauties cost fifty cents at that time.
3. The three-stick six-sided "barn door" flat paper kite. These are quite rare and I have very little experience with them.

And that's it, at least from my era, which was roughly from 1960-1966. If there any additional types I never saw them. In the early 1970s, plastic delta kites became all the rage, and paper bow kites gradually went into eclipse. Keep in mind that after the Decatur operation ceased and "Hi-Flier" was reduced to being a brand name licensed to nameless toy manufacturers, the name was applied to lots of peculiar kid-things, including marbles and yoyos.

The Hi-Flier diamond kites came in three sizes, specified by the length of the long (vertical) stick:

• Small: The vertical stick was 29 1/4" and the bow stick was 23 3/4".
• Medium: The vertical stick was 36" and the bow stick 29 1/4". Note that the bow stick of this size was the same as the vertical stick in the small size.
• Large: The vertical stick was 44" and the bow stick 36".

The Small Kites (30")

The small paper diamond kites were 10c when I was flying them. (They later went up to 15c, and before the end of the Hi-Flier era, 49c.) 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. The price went up after I got out of grade school, and in fact the American Beauty kite I have hanging on my wall carries the price 49c, meaning it must have been manufactured as late as the mid-1970s. The small kites were the best flyers of anything in the Hi-Flier product line.

I remember these main graphic designs:

1. The "Playmates of the Clouds." These were one-color, printed on white or colored paper. The ink was often black but I remember having them printed in blue, green, orange, and magenta ink as well. The design had a futuristic flying wing aircraft in the center, below the logo "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. Some older specimens had the words "Little Boy" in place of the numbers—and one I saw had no number at all. (Most that had numbers had the number "30" for some reason.) Early on, the Playmates were printed on colored paper, including a rich brick-red, yellow, and pale gray-blue, but by the mid-1960s I don't recall seeing them printed on any but white paper.
2. The "Strat-O-Flier" kites. These were from a little before my time, but I did see a few in my earlier childhood, and they turn up on eBay from time to time. (Great kite watching there: Just search for "Hi-Flier.") The notable thing about the Strat-O-Flier kites was that the main design (a bland spaceship) found its way onto the later plastic Orbiteer kites. (See below.)

The Playmates of the Clouds kites came in a wonderful variety of colors, though the design was almost entirely identical. Here are the color schemes that I have seen:

• Black on Red paper
• Black on White paper
• Green on Light Yellow paper
• Dark Blue on Light Blue paper
• Dark Blue on Red paper
• Dark Blue on Light Yellow paper
• Magenta on White paper
• Orange on Light Yellow paper

At the very end of the paper kite era, in the midlate 1980s, Hi-Flier did sell some interesting new designs in the smallest size, including a kite printed with a photograph of the Space Shuttle taking off. This is the most recent of any Hi-Flier paper kite that I'm aware of. (Note the copyright date on the photo at right.)

My research on eBay indicates that there were other small kite designs as well, but for some reason I never saw them in the field. One was the "Rainbow" design, which I did see on a barn-door kite, but never a 2-stick diamond kite.

The small Hi-Flier diamond kites 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 Medium Kites (36")

For a while the medium-sized diamond kites were also 10c at Bud's Talcott Hardware, but they went up to 15c by the time I was in high school. The most common and in my opinion the most beautiful and effective design was the American Beauty. (See the photo in the header of this article.) Lots of kids were flying them on and just after the Fourth of July. They had a globe on a blue field at the top, with red and white strips below, and the legend "American Beauty" in red on white below the stripes. This always has been my favorite Hi-Flier graphics design, and I am proud to own a mint specimen.

In addition to the standard Hi-Flier designs, of course, were the multitude of advertising and promo kites, most of which were in the same 36" X 29 1/4" size as the medium kites.

The Large Kites (44")

I don't remember these as well, because I only flew a couple. The design shown here is the one I remember, though there have been a couple of others on eBay. I have recently seen an older kite in red with the legend "Big Boy" that was the size of the large kites that I flew, but it must have been a little before my time. It looked something like the "Playmates of the Clouds" 10c kites, with a large "Hi-Flier" logo above an identical Buck Rogers airplane, and the slightly silly legend "Tailless Dancing Kite" toward the bottom. (This last seems to have been an early Hi-Flier slogan, but I don't remember seeing it during my own kite days.) I've seen bow kites dance, but when they do, it usually means you don't have the bridle set up correctly! There were a series of handsome new designs on the "Large" kites in the 1970s, including an Indian chief and "Stinger McBee." Another design I have seen only once on eBay had the Playmates' "flying wing" aircraft but little else, and the legend "Big Ben" at the kite's center.

One of my friends preferred the large kites (which at that time cost 15c) and looked down his pointy nose at my (small by comparison) American Beauties. 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) the extra nickel seemed an unwarranted profligacy.

The Plastic Bow Kites (30")

These cost a quarter when I flew them (later 29 cents) 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 that we flew had only one design in that era: A Flash-Gordon style spacecraft with the legend "Orbiteer." I think they came in different color schemes, though. The one I remember most clearly was magenta with blue highlights, though as you can see here they existed in blue with magenta highlights as well. A later design in plastic was called "Color Glow", and the one I saw (as usual, on eBay) had a flying horse against a red and white backround. One thing I will say for the plastic kites: They were rugged. It took more than one dive into the bushes to shred one, but somehow I was never good at economics and didn't do the math, even though I might have come out ahead had I I gotten in the habit of hoarding bottles and thinking, "Plastic!"

I have only very recently (early 2006) seen an example of a Hi-Flier promo kite (for Dutch Boy Paints) in plastic.

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. In the period I was flying them they had a very simple art design: Just colored paper (usually green and white) with relatively small drawings of jet aircraft, 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. (This may be why I don't see many assembled ones on the auction sites. Nobody wants to risk destroying a 35-year-old kite that might fetch fifty bucks!) The photo of a newer kite below comes from Peter Lamonica, and is of a later art design, with four color printing on white paper, rather than the earlier black or blue ink on colored paper. Peter hasn't flown his yet and doesn't intend to!

The reason is simple: 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 long 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 wind, as I learned after awhile.

The Barn-Door Kites

These are the rarest of all the early Hi-Flier kites, and I myself have never had the honor of flying one. In fact, 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 definitely 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. I have since seen the "Rainbow" design on a 2-stick "small" paper kite offered on eBay. ( It was the same design on the barn-door kite I saw back in '66. Hi-Flier made multiple uses of its designs, as shown by the "American Beauty" design on the barn-door kite at right.

I have seen only a couple of examples offered on eBay. One looks vaguely like the "Playmates of the Clouds" kites, but has the word "Dandy" or "Little Ace" under the flying wing aircraft. (See auction #1701410349.) These predated me, I'm sure, and probably hail from the early 50's or even the late 40's. A more recent example showed up on eBay, and has the same general stars-and-stripes design as the "American Beauty" kite I flew as a kid and have in my own (small) collection. The American Beauty design shown here is unrolled, but not assembled--the sticks aren't in it.

The barn door kites were flat kites. They had three sticks, not two: An "X" of two identical sticks with a shorter stick perpendicular to them, joined at the center with a metal staple. I suspect they weren't popular because they took a fair amount of careful rigging: three separate bridles that had to meet above the kite's dead center. They also required a tail—and without sufficient tail, my guess is that they lasted maybe ninety seconds in clumsy 9-year-old hands. To see a close-up of the instructions printed on the barn door kites (it's the block of text beneath the words "Little Ace") click here.

They barn door kites were quite small—smaller than even the small bow kites—and having had some experience with small flat kites, I would guess that they were a significant challenge to get into the air. At right it is a photo I received from Robert Smallwood of Sydney, Australia, of a "Little Ace" barn door kite, fully assembled. Abundant thanks, Robert! I hope at some point to re-create the barn door design here to see just how tough they are to fly.

Advertising and 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 have Hi-Flier print its company advertisement or other design and give them to kids as promotional items. The number of such kites to appear on eBay is completely incredible. Jif peanut butter, Sinclair and Texaco, Studebaker cars, Burger King, AC spark plugs, various local businesses and radio stations; it's amazing.

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. (It survived the flight and now hangs in a place of honor in her basement.) These seem to have been made well into the 1970s (or possibly the 1980s!) and were probably a big profit center for the company.

I have seen only one Hi-Flier promo kite in plastic, for Dutch Boy paints. (See photo at right.)

Every so often today I see a plastic diamond promo kite being handed out somewhere, but the kites are too small and too unstable to fly well. The only good plastic promo kite I've ever seen in recent years was a Green Giant promo that was a "boxtop" offer in the early 1990s. It was actually a five-point kite with plastic tubular sticks fitting into a molded plastic hub at the kite's center. The string attached to a loop on the moded hub, and it flew beautifully in very light winds with neither bridle nor tail.

I sure wish some nostalgia-conscious company would troll around and find somebody who could make two-stick paper diamond kites with custom printed art. I'd pay $8 or $10 for such a kite, and if they could be made cheaply enough, they would be a sure seller in places like Restoration Hardware, which now sells repro 50s toys and other nostalgia items from the immediate Postwar era.

String and Winders

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. (Even though the packaging read, "Engineered especially for kite flying!" Yeah, right.) I recall a late-era product called Megalon Kite Cord that was a much stronger line material, not cotton but some sort of synthetic fiber, and slightly dangerous in that you could cut into your hand with it if you tried to snap it by wrapping it around a finger and pulling hard. (With the cotton cord that was easy.)

The best Hi-Flier product apart from kites, however, was their $1.29 Spinwinder. I never had one, but I watched a kid use one once down at Edison schoolyard, and it made winding string around a lumpy stick look pretty sick by comparison. The device was a red plastic spool with a handle, and through the handle was threaded a metal rod that bent into a crank at the bottom (with a ball-shaped plastic knob to grasp) 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 (and could be hard on the knuckles!) which is why I still use a "hose-reel" style reel when I fly. I have a couple of pictures of the Spinwinder here, and it remains a pretty cool gadget. I recall sketching a clone made from a coffee can, but never got around to building it.

There was also a very simple bent-wire winder that was much cheaper, called the "Hi-Flier Kite Winder." It sold, sans string, for ten cents. Supposedly it could hold a thousand feet of string, but I was and remain a little dubious. I tried imitating one once by bending a coathanger into the same general shape, and the string got seriously bollixed up with only a single 300 foot roll on it.

I have seen photos of one final type of kite winder, something called the "Hi-Flier Kite Kaddy," which was a fairly conventional paddle-style winder made of either plastic or wood painted red. The Kite Kaddy appeared to come with string on it, and looked like a fairly early product, probably late 1940s or early 1950s. I never encountered one "in the field."

I watch the collector press and the auction sites for mention of other Hi-Flier products, and I'll list them here as I discover them.

Non-Kite Products

Intriguingly, I have seen flying model airplane kits carrying the Hi-Flier brand listed on the auction sites, but I never saw one in "real life" and don't know precisely when they were available. There seem to be both early ones (I would guess late 1940s to early 1950s) sold by the Decatur organization, and later ones from the 1970's after Damon acquired the company. These appear to be of the paper-and-balsa variety, which were quite common back then.

Damon seemed to be collecting companies that sold things that flew; they also owned Estes, the model rocket outfit. Later on, somebody started selling Hi-Flier marbles, of all things—talk about stretching the brand! (I keep expecting to see a Hi-Flier slingshot, which might make the marbles fit the line a little better...) On to the depths of absurdity, I saw a Hi-Flier yoyo on eBay, from 1996. Clearly the Hi-Flier kite legacy is now almost forgotten.

Hi-Flier's Competitors

Other companies made paper kites down through the years, but none of them ever came close to Hi-Flier in market penetration. The only one anybody remembers anymore is TopFlite, which was a brand of paper kite fielded by Crunden-Martin Mfg. Co. of St. Louis. Kites were a sideline for Crunden-Martin and the company did many other things. (Their headquarters building in St. Louis is now on the National Register of Historic Places. Photos here.) Crunden-Martin went out of business in 1990, and it's far from clear when they stopped making TopFlite Kites.

The best-known TopFlite kite design is probably the Man in the Moon, followed closely by the Jolly Roger. Many people think these are Hi-Fliers, as they are the same size and proportions, and printed on the same kind of paper. Interestingly, TopFlite used plastic sticks on some of their later paper kites. (See the photo above.) A nice Man in the Moon specimen recently sold on eBay for over $300!

I have seen eBay auctions of paper kites from a toy company named Wilder Mfg. Co., also of St. Louis, but I know nothing about them. The design I've seen is "Eagle Flyer" and they looked to be pre-1960.

Kites from Hi-Flier's competitors fetch high prices from collectors simply because they're relatively rare by comparison. Far fewer kites were made, and thus fewer have survived to the current day.

Build a "Hi-Flier" Kite of Your Own!

You can make a reasonable facsimile of a Hi-Flier "medium" diamond kite without a great deal of trouble. You won't even need glue! I've done it many times (most recently for a church youth group's "Risen Cross" project) and it's easy. Here's how:

1. Get yourself two fairly flexible sticks from a crafts place like Michael's or Hobby Lobby. The ones I mean are made of fir or sometimes a hardwood like alder. Don't use balsa wood—it's not strong enough! The sticks I use are 1/4" wide, 1/8" thick, and 36" long. While you're there, get a roll of Mylar plastic sheet, which is usually used for wrapping packages. It comes in many translucent colors. Also buy a roll of thin string.
2. Using a thin-bladed coping saw (they're essential kite-making tools, and cheap at Home Depot) cut one of the sticks to 29 1/4" long. (Leave the other stick at 36".) Then cut a 1/8" deep slit longwise in each end of both sticks, four slits in all.
3. With a Sharpie permanent marker, mark a point 8" down from the top of the 36" stick. This is where the two sticks must cross. On the bow stick, mark a point at the center, 14 5/8" from either end.
4. Align the two sticks side by side (not crossed!) so that the marked points are together. "Multiple up" a "newspaper style" rubber band, and slide it over the two sticks until you have it at the marked points.
5. Now, carefully twist the bow stick 180 degrees from the long stick and hold it. If the rubber-band was too tight in Step 4 it may break; go back and multiple up another band a one or two fewer times. Take a second rubber band, multiple it up, and slide it over the two sticks until it reaches the marked points.
6. Let go of the sticks, and the two opposed rubber bands will spread the sticks into a rough cross. Adjust them so that the bow stick is dead-centered on the long stick at the 8" point from the top.
7. Starting at the top of the long stick, tie a length of thin string to the notched end. Double-knot it so that it won't work loose. Now run the string around the four points of the diamond, getting it into the notches that you cut with the coping saw. When you get back to the top of the diamond, tie the string to the notched end firmly and multiple-knot it.
8. Unroll some Mylar sheet, and lay the diamond frame down on it so that the Mylar extends beyond the string and the ends of the kite frame at all four points. Use a piece or two of Scotch tape to hold the stick frame to the Mylar so it won't slide around.
9. Using a yardstick as a straightedge and a Sharpie permanent marker, draw a diamond on the Mylar sheet all the way around the kite, one inch larger than the string sides of the frame.
10. Cut out the diamond-shaped piece of Mylar with a scissors.
11. Attach the Mylar diamond to the stick-and-string frame using Scotch tape: Fold each edge over the string for 1", and then tape the 1" flap to the Mylar.
12. Poke holes for the bridle using the pointed end of the scissors. Make two holes, each 6" from one end of the long stick.
13. Make the bridle using a length of string about 30" long, with an additional 2" on each end for the knots. Fix an end through one of the bridle holes and tie it firmly to the stick, then fix the other end through the other hole and do the same.
14. Tie your flight line to the bridle at about 8" from where the top end of the bridle is tied to the long stick.
15. Add a "bow tie" tail consisting of a length of string or ribbon tied to the bottom end of the long stick, with tissue-paper bow ties every six inches, for about five feet. This is more for show; I've flown these kids in light winds without tails at all.

That's all there is to it. I've included a photo of one of my own Hi-Flier repro kites flying in Scottsdale, Arizona. The only downside is that with clear enough Mylar sheet, the kite is almost invisible once it's a few hundred feet high.

That's All for Now

That's about all I remember about Hi-Flier paper kites. I don't know precisely when the paper kite era came to an end. The most recent paper kite of theirs I've seen dates to 1987, which is considerably later than I had expected. At some point I hope to take a spin down to Decatur and browse the local library.

Anybody got any more facts? Please let me know, and I'll add them to this essay!