A Dime-Store Kite, Five Miles of Twine, and a Twenty-Mile Chase Across St. Louis
Part of The American Time Capsule — preserving the people, places, products, traditions, and everyday moments that shaped growing up in America before the digital age. This article explores the games, adventures, traditions, music, rites of passage, and neighborhood experiences that defined American childhood.
My dad ran a feed company in East St. Louis, and the place had industrial sewing machines used to stitch shut big feed sacks.
Those machines used enormous spools of twine.
Dad always said there were about five miles of string on one spool.
To a kid with a dime-store paper kite, that didn’t sound like packaging material.
It sounded like opportunity.
Central School, where I attended kindergarten through third grades, was only a few minutes from our house, although I rarely got there the way most kids did.
I had my own shortcut.
I’d cut across our next-door neighbor’s back yard, then through the apple orchard belonging to their next-door neighbor. At the far end of the orchard stood a high wooden fence separating it from the Central School playground.
I’d climb the fence, swing myself over the top, and drop down on the other side.
I was at school.
No sidewalks. No crosswalks. No carefully planned route through the neighborhood.
Neighbor’s yard. Apple orchard. Fence. Playground.
It took only a few minutes.
That playground was already part of my everyday childhood world long before it became the launching pad for what may have been the most over-engineered dime-store kite in Ferguson history.
To a kid my age that playground was huge.
It had a baseball diamond with a backstop where we played baseball on Saturdays, we flew kites there, roller skated and whacked tennis balls against the school’s brick walls with a tennis racket.
One spring afternoon, that spool met a dime-store kite on the Central School playground.
Central School was part of the Ferguson world where so many of these memories began. I wrote more about that hometown—and the thousands of people who still share its memories—in Growing Up in Ferguson, Missouri.
We knew ordinary kite string could burn your hands when it ran out fast, so I had gloves to handle the line and water nearby to cool it.
Looking back, this probably belongs with all the other childhood ideas that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. I wrote about that wonderfully unsupervised era in How Did We Ever Make It to Adulthood?.
This wasn’t exactly a backyard kite anymore.
We had turned a dime-store toy into a launch operation.
Up it went. Past the church steeples, past the water tower, past the point where grown-ups say, “Okay, that’s high enough.”
Eventually I couldn’t even see the kite anymore.
All I had was the pull of the line.
Then the string suddenly snapped tight with a shudder.
A moment later, I saw a jet descending toward Lambert Field, St. Louis International Airport.
The line went slack.
I didn’t need a committee meeting to figure out what had happened.
The jet had cut my kite string.
Airplanes were already part of my childhood around St. Louis. On other afternoons, Dad would take us near the airport just to watch the jets come in—a memory I preserved in The Day Dad Took Us Plane Watching.
From where I stood, it seemed obvious: a jet on approach to Lambert had crossed the line and cut it.
I could almost visualize a pilot and co-pilot grinning as an out of control kite passed their window.
Dad didn’t even react, he grabbed his binoculars, I grabbed my pride, and we threw ourselves into the car.
We traced that drifting speck across neighborhoods and fields, losing it, finding it, arguing about who saw it last.
By the time we caught up, we were twenty miles away in St. Charles.
I still remember the look we got from the lady who answered the door of the house we knocked on to get permission to enter her back yard to retrieve oiur kite.
And my Dad making me wind up as much of the twine as I could, once we were back home.
Uncle Jack Put It in the Newspaper
The story became family legend, but there was also something better than family memory.
My uncle Jack Rice wrote about it.
Jack was a feature writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and he thought a kid losing a kite to a jet and then chasing it halfway across the St. Louis area was worth a column.
So somewhere in the newspaper record is proof that Dad and I really did go hunting for a runaway kite.
I suppose that’s when a childhood mishap officially becomes history.
The Kite Was Worth a Dime. The Memory Was Worth Much More
We brought the kite home like a trophy.
Not because it was expensive.
Not because it was beautiful.
It was a dime-store paper kite.
But Dad and I had chased that ridiculous thing across miles of Missouri, binoculars in hand, refusing to let it disappear.
That’s what I remember now.
Not the kite itself.
The chase.
The car.
Dad beside me.
The excitement every time we spotted it again in the distance.
And Uncle Jack deciding the whole crazy adventure belonged in the newspaper.
I’ve owned plenty of things in my life that cost a lot more than that kite.
Very few gave me a better story.
🗣️ Your Turn
Childhood had a way of turning the simplest things into adventures.
Mine started with a dime-store paper kite, an enormous spool of industrial twine, and a playground in Ferguson. Somehow it ended with Dad and me chasing that kite all the way to St. Charles after a jet apparently cut the line.
What childhood adventure do you still tell people about—the one that sounds a little unbelievable until you explain that, yes, it really happened?
Maybe it involved a bicycle, a treehouse, a creek, a homemade contraption, something that flew—or a parent who decided to join the adventure instead of telling you to forget about it.
Finish this sentence:
“The craziest thing I did as a kid that I still remember was __________.”
Tell us your story in the comments. And if anyone from Ferguson remembers a kid flying a kite ridiculously high over Central School, I may finally have a witness.
🇺🇸 Continue Exploring
A dime-store kite, an apple orchard, a backyard fence, and a twenty-mile chase with Dad were all part of a childhood when the neighborhood could become an adventure without anybody planning it. Here are more stories from that world.
🪁 The Games That Raised a Generation
Before entertainment came with screens and subscriptions, a few kids, a little imagination, and whatever we could find were usually enough.
💡 Come Home When the Streetlights Come On
When childhood freedom meant disappearing into the neighborhood for hours—with one important instruction: be home when the streetlights came on.
🚲 Kids Didn’t Need Batteries
Paper kites, bicycles, homemade inventions, and imagination could keep us occupied for an entire afternoon.
🎃 Halloween With Popcorn Balls
Another memory from a time when neighborhoods felt smaller, childhood seemed freer, and simple traditions became lifelong memories.
🕰️ Return to the American Time Capsule
Browse the curated collection of stories, memories, people, places, and everyday experiences from the America we remember.
📚 Explore the Complete Time Capsule Archive
See every American Time Capsule article—including posts that may not appear on the main hub.
⚠️ Bunker Rule
Some childhood stories sound better every time they’re told. This one already sounds crazy enough without any help from me.
A dime-store paper kite. A huge spool of industrial twine. A jet coming into Lambert. Dad with binoculars. And a chase that eventually took us all the way to St. Charles.
If you grew up in Ferguson, went to Central School, flew kites around St. Louis, or remember the neighborhood I’m describing, I’d especially like to hear from you.
Your memory may not match mine exactly. That’s okay. More than sixty years can move a few details around, and childhood geography has a way of looking different when you’re no longer eight years old.
Share what you remember, don’t turn somebody else’s childhood into a courtroom proceeding—and if you happen to have an old copy of Jack Rice’s newspaper column about this kite, forget everything else and call me.
📌 Bunker Notice
This story is based on my childhood memories of growing up in Ferguson, Missouri. More than sixty years have passed, so distances, conversations, the exact route of the kite, and other details are presented as I remember them rather than as a precise historical record.
I remember flying the kite from the Central School playground using one of the enormous spools of twine from my father’s feed company. I remember the line going slack as a jet approached Lambert. And I remember Dad grabbing the binoculars and the two of us setting off after the runaway kite.
My uncle, Jack Rice, a feature writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, later wrote about the adventure. I’m currently trying to locate a copy of that original newspaper column. If I find it, I’ll be able to compare a contemporary account of the adventure with the version that has lived in my memory all these years.
The Richard Archives preserves memories like this not because they made history, but because they made a life.
And somewhere, I hope, there’s still an old newspaper clipping proving that Dad and I really did chase a dime-store kite halfway across St. Louis.