strange fruit in the old neighborhood

It's a little over 70 degrees here today at the Manor. There's a fair wind blowing and I am reminded of another one of those rites of Spring from my mis-spent childhood. Sometime around late March or early April, one of more of us kids would get a parachutist toy. I'm not sure what the name of them was, or if they even had an "official" one. It was a plastic figure of a guy in full airborne regalia, about 5" high, attached with strings to a light plastic parachute. Upon seeing it, the rest of us would immediately run out to get one or more, the neighborhood reverberating with our whining and badgering. They couldn't have cost much, because I don't remember any real arguments over obtaining one. (My mother firmly believed that anything costing more than a dollar (or 10 cents for candy) was a complete waste of money and would spoil me - probably the cause of my current profligate ways.)
The instructions were that you'd carefully wrap the parachute around the figure in some sort of weird origami configuration that my fumble fingers could never get quite right. You'd then hurl him into the air as high as you could. The parachute would unfurl and he'd glide back to the ground. That is, if you lived in Kansas. But NoVA is not Kansas, (a fact I get on my knees and thank the heavens for each day). We have trees, houses, lamp posts, telephone wires and all manner of skyward obstacles. By no later than the third throw, your brand new toy would be stuck 30-40 feet up on a tree limb, gutter, or telephone pole. By the end of an afternoon, the entire neighborhood's supply of these poor toys would be hanging about, in a grim display of the futility of trying to have fun above a height of 10'. The place probably looked monstrous to any Billie Holiday fans...
Fortunately for the sake of the view, the trees would shortly fill out, obscuring most of the victims, while heavy winds would cart away the rest, (I don't think it took too long for the string on these things to rot away from exposure to the elements).
At any rate, a quick search online only revealed a few smallish and wussified versions, (and going for $4.95 - no way my mother would spring for that type of extravagence). There's no real point to this story, it's just some old memory rattling around in my head today.
And while we're on the topic of aerial fun, does anyone remember model rockets? I think the main company was called Estes, out of a little dump of a town in Eastern Colorado called Penrose. And although I desperately wanted one, there was no way my folks were going to spring for it, and in retrospect, I must agree with them. There was just no place even remotely safe from lawsuits that you could shoot one off around where we lived. I knew one kid whose father was a teacher up at the Seminary and he did have the room in that wonderful field they own that's now partially taken up by their stadium. He'd invite me up occasionally to watch his missile launches.
There were two things about Estes rockets that were always interesting to me. The first was the safety pamphlet they'd put out warning you to NEVER EVER, NOT IN A MILLION YEARS should you even attempt to think about the possibility of making your own rocket fuel/engines, but should only buy from them. They'd put out these horrific pictures that I now suspect were simply outtakes from the photos taken after Hiroshima, with captions saying stuff like "Little Timmy thought he could make his own fuel cells in his parent's basement -AND THAT'S HOW WE LOST CEDAR RAPIDS". I also seem to remember tales of blown off hands and heads, etc. , there was a certain level of gruesomeness to the hobby literature.
Added to that was the second feature to model rocketry, which I call the Junior Mengele syndrome. Some of the models came with payload areas. There were the usual earnest sales pitches about high altitude experiments for young and growing scientific minds. But the fact of the matter is that you give something like this to a kid, and I guarantee you, the first and only thing going in that paylaod is going to be alive. Who knows how many hamsters died - shoved into a plastic chamber with little or no air, sitting on top of an explosive charge and hurtled a few hundred feet into the air at about 10g's. So much for growing minds. (This leads to the question - do Germans become rocketeers or do rocketeers become Germans*...).
At any rate, just some random thoughts on a Spring afternoon...

*Oh irony of ironies, Wernher von Braun was buried barely a mile from where I saw these model rockets being launched.