by Kirby Lindsay, posted 5 August 2011
Owner of Gasworks Park Kite Shop, Kathy Goodwind started her career as a chemist. An assignment at Harborview Medical Center brought her to Seattle. A visit to a kite festival, held at Volunteer Park, brought her in contact with people flying small, colorful kites. She thought, “I can do that!”
Since 1976, Goodwind has built a world-wide reputation as a designer, manufacturer and retailer of kites of nearly every size and description. Over those same decades, Gasworks Park Kite Shop has become a mecca for kite enthusiasts of every age, ability and aptitude.
In August, kite flyers from around the world will come to the bright, color-filled store, in East Fremont on Stone Way. They arrive here for a trek to Long Beach, Washington and the Washington State International Kite Festival, held August 15th – 21st. “While they are in town,” Goodwind explained, acknowledging that Long Beach may be remote from Seattle, but not for visitors from, say, New Zealand, “they want to visit the kite shop in town, which is us.”
All Things Kites
Goodwind knows kites. She can relate their history, and follows recent developments. She refers those looking for an accurate crash course to ‘The Penguin Book of Kites’ by David Pelham, the kite “bible.” Goodwind grabs copies of the book, last published in 1976, whenever she finds them. It gives history, along with descriptions of standard kite styles and models for making several kites.
According to Pelham, the origins of kites remain obscure although general belief has them first invented in China. References to kites can be found as far back as 1000 B.C. According to Goodwind, nearly every culture, and country, has a history of kite usage. Uses have ranged from pleasure to purposeful, including divining fertility and destiny, signaling, fishing, measuring, weather forecasting, warfare and conveying materials. Marco Polo wrote of kites fitted out to lift a most unfortunate man in the air, as punishment and/or information gathering.
Today, most Kite Shop customers seek kites for pleasure – and encounter a vast selection. Pelham’s book lists kite types as flat (or plane-surface,) bowed, box, compound, sled, parafoil and delta. Goodwind admitted his list has gone out-of-date as kites have continued to evolve and develop in style, size and potential.
All Things Kite Shop
Goodwind admitted her last name came after she got into kites, while getting out of marriage to a Goodwin. According to her, over her ex’s objections, the divorce judge granted her request for an extra “D.”
Her kite designing started after she took a small kite she’d designed to Great Winds, a kite shop once located in Downtown Seattle, to get it bridled (the connection of string to the kite.) “They went crazy for it,” Goodwind described.
Sales increased with a contract to make dozens used to decorate a pizza chain of restaurants. For her manufacturing, she leased a studio at the Sun Loft, then near Green Lake, then on to the Swallow’s Nest.
“I started the retail shop,” she explained, when a distributor for her kites couldn’t pay her. ‘Send me kites instead,’ she told them. She rented a small house near Gas Works Park, then moved into space owned by the aeronautics company Avtech. The Nisqually earthquake left the space uninhabitable, so she moved yet again, to Stone Way, in 2001.
All Things Change
Over the last decade, Goodwind has licensed her kite designs to Chinese manufacturers, and gone strictly retail. “We couldn’t keep up with the production,” she explained, “with the demand.” Besides, selling kites all over the U.S. meant attending endless trade shows in order to display the latest design.
Nowadays most kites come from China, Goodwind explained, which mean supply can be extremely uneven. Thousands of a certain kite design may be available, for a while, and then disappear. The Gasworks Park Kite Shop website has 300+ designs listed, but some aren’t immediately available.
“I ran the Seattle Kite Festival for 12 years,” Goodwind explained. It brought in customers, and helped consolidate local kite shops – back when others existed – but it also became onerous as the festival required hard work, money and willing assistants that grew harder and harder to coerce.
All Things Fun
“You wouldn’t have a space shuttle if you didn’t have a kite,” Goodwind likes to point out. Kites came as precursor to the airplane, she explained, “It’s man’s desire to fly, at the root.”
From the start, in her retail business, “I targeted those just starting out,” she said. Goodwind welcomes beginners, and recommends, an easy to fly delta kite. Yet, the store offers dozens and dozens of different kites, in a wide range of prices. She has customers that buy kites for birthday parties, or as gifts to take on foreign visits. In addition, Kite Shop also offers a charming selection of toys, windsocks, wind spinners, and yo-yos (including the new ‘string-less!’)
Go fly a kite, for fun and for posterity. “Just go out to the hill, with a kite,” explained Goodwind, referencing ‘Kite Hill’ as designated at Gas Works Park by Seattle City Mayor Charles Royer, “you’ll draw a crowd!”
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©2011 Kirby Lindsay. This column is protected by intellectual property laws, including U.S. copyright laws. Reproduction, adaptation or distribution without permission is prohibited.