What does Lakeshore Avenue have to do with plans to build your own reentry kite? In the late 1960s, the Dime and Dollar store didn’t sell one of the materials needed to make it – biaxially oriented polyethylene terephthalate – mylar.
Lakeshore Avenue in Oakland, California, runs from the south end of Lake Merritt and ends a block from the house that I grew up in on Calmar Avenue. In the 1970s, Huey Newton lived at the south end at 1200 Lakeshore Avenue.
When I was a kid, going down to “Lakeshore” meant going to the commercial area between Mandana Boulevard and Lake Park Avenue. The main business that was my focus as a child and teen was the Dime and Dollar Store, which my family referred to as the “Dime Store.”
This Oakland Wiki entry pretty much sums up the Dime and Dollar Store for a kid growing up in the 1950s and 1960s:
“…they had pretty much everything…including fabrics and toys and lots of candy. They always had all those wax lips and mustaches and movie magazines. The lady with the black beehive would follow the kids all around the store. You could buy ‘caps’ too and squirt guns”
Candace Miller Blackman
In the late 1960’s, my Uncle Jimmy gave me a subscription to Popular Science. I’m pretty sure that Uncle Jimmy and that subscription launched me on a lifetime of making things.
The July 1967 issue of Popular Science Magazine had and article titled, “Build Your Own REENTRY KITE” It detailed a kite designed by NASA aeronautical engineer, Francis Rogallo, who was trying to solve the problem of space vehicle reentry on land, instead of water. Rogallo had invented what became known as the “Rogallo Wing”, the basis of the modern hang glider.
Space technology was fascinating to the 15 year old me, and the idea that I could build something using NASA technology made it even more so. The article suggested making the kite out of brown wrapping paper or aluminum coated mylar.
I went to the Dime Store and asked if they had any mylar. They didn’t know what it is was. I tried to describe it as a metallized plastic. That didn’t help.
Mylar (BoPET – biaxially oriented polyethylene terephthalate) was developed in the mid-1950s by Dupont and other chemical companies. NASA used mylar in a balloon, Echo 2, launched in 1964. Unfortunately, the technology had not yet trickled down the the Dime Store, so I built my kite out of brown wrapping paper.