In the mid-sixties I had a paper route in Brigham City, Utah delivering the Deseret News.  It was my first experience in how to operate a small business as we were all essentially independent contractors.  My route took about an hour & one half delivering 50 to 60 papers on my 3 speed English bike.  The newspaper company was always trying to get us to sign up new subscribers.  Incentives were given based on the number of new subscribers we recruited.  The most memorable premium I ever received was a Gayla Sky Spy kite.  While not my first it was a very good kite.  I could stand out in the street in front of the house & launch it by propping the kite up, laying out about thirty feet of line & towing it until it cleared the roof top & got into some clean air.  I considered this advanced kite technique at the time.  I was fourteen. 

Once in the air it was easy to go to the end of a 500' spool of line.  We used the latest kite technology, Hi-Flier Megalon Super Strength kite cord made of thin light nylon.  It was much better than the old cotton string of the fifties.  You could splice on more line but after a while the kite could not lift more line & it would not go higher, just further away.  If you had out enough line you could let go of the line & the kite would still have enough tension on it to keep flying as the line slowly slipped along the ground.  It was a lot of effort to reel in a thousand feet of line using an empty Suran wrap tube.  One time we even tried to use an Erector set motor to make a power winder but long extension cords were hard to come by which was the limiting factor on that effort.  Eventually I got a Hi-Flier spin winder.

Certain times of the year the west wind would blow for days.  I don't know why we left the kite up all night for the first time.  But once we found out it was possible we would try to go for a record number of hours.  The best we ever did was three days.  When the kite did come down unattended we would leap on our bikes & follow the string for a couple blocks to hopefully find the tough little kite laying in a yard some ways away.  Eventually there came a day when the kite was not to be found.  Then I went into a dark time of no kites, but the girls kept me distracted....   SHBKF