The modest snow we had last week brought dozens of kids to the schoolyard behind our house where a gentle hill allows a long slide on sleds. Except, most kids didn’t have sleds, they had plastic toboggans. When we were kids, there was only one way to zip down a hill in the snow. A genuine Flexible Flyer.
A Flexible Flyer was at the top of every kid’s wish list come Christmas time. Both boys and girls insisted on a genuine Flexible Flyer. Anything else was a cheap imitation.
We had a wonderful hill in front of our house in Beckley, WV. Â It was called Jennings Street. It was probably 200 yards long with a steep grade enough to make a truck shift into low gear. We flew down the street like the bobsled teams in the Olympics. We reluctantly shared the icy street with cars, but we had the right of way and the cars knew it. To make our sleds go extra fast, we rubbed a bar of Ivory soap up and down the grooved runners, and we went likes bats out of you-know-where.
Flexible Flyers were one of the first sleds to be steerable. Usually, sledders would lay on their bellies, give the sled a good push start and scream down the hill, but sometimes we would sit erect on the sleds and steer with our feet. Having tow sledders at a time was fun. The extra weight gave the sled more mass, and we went even faster. The crashes were spectacular with bodies hurling in all directions. It was pure fun.
Flexible Flyers were patented in 1899 by Samuel Leeds, a manufacturer of farming equipment. Leeds began making the sleds to keep his workers busy during the winter.
At first, the sleds languished in stores selling plows and farm equipment until someone had the bright idea to put them in toy departments. In 1915, the company sold 120,000 sleds and the run-on Flexible Flyers was underway.
Today, most Flexible Flyers are made in China, and they are not nearly the pieces of sturdy equipment they once were when every Boomer kid had one and nothing else would do.
