How Lincoln City became the ‘Kite Capital of the World’

This year, Lincoln City will celebrate its 40th annual summer kite festival and its 45th annual fall kite festival.

The small Oregon coast town’s title as the self-proclaimed “Kite Capital of the World” has stuck, but not for obvious reasons.

It’s not because these are the largest kite festivals in the U.S. — that distinction belongs to Washington State International Kite Festival in Long Beach.

Nor are Lincoln City’s kite festivals the oldest in Oregon. That title goes to Rockaway Beach, which first held a kite festival in 1972.

But Lincoln City possessed all the necessary ingredients – dedicated volunteers, ideal geographic conditions, and strategic branding – to become a premier kiting destination.

Susan Stoner launches a multiple stunt kite during the 1986 kite festival at D River Wayside State Park.

Oregonian

How it started

Lincoln City was a sleepy little town back in 1979 when Steve Lamb, owner of Catch the Wind kite stores, organized the town’s first kite festival.

“The radio station would shut off at dusk,” said longtime festival volunteer Ronda Brewer. “This place literally shut down in winter. You could walk down the center of 101.”

When Brewer heard about the first kite festival that September, she went to see what the fuss was about.

“I bought a kite, bought some string, came down to the beach and asked them if I could play,” Brewer said. “I went out there on the first day of the festival. I cut this guy’s line. I was hooked from that point on.”

Brewer had discovered rokkaku, a Japanese style of six-sided battle kiting in which the goal is to either sever a competitor’s line or to catch the tip of a competitor’s kite and drive it into the ground.

She went on to become a four-time grand national champion in rokkaku, earning the nickname “Taz” for her “Tasmanian devil” level of aggressiveness on the field. Along with her husband, Brewer founded

Phantom Star Design

to sell rokkaku kits that can be assembled at home.

Randy Kollars, left and Ronda Brewer, rokkaku kite fliers, at the D River State Recreation Site in Lincoln city.

Samantha Swindler/ The Oregonian

The heyday of kite flying

Brewer’s love of kites led her to work for Lamb and his chain of Catch the Wind kite shops from 1985 to 1990. Lamb organized the kite festival for its first 15 years.

Glen Rothstein, regional director of the

American Kitefliers Association

, said both Catch the Wind and the Lincoln City Kite Festival began during the period he calls the “heyday” of kite flying.

“At the end of the 1970s and into the early 1980s, kiting started to explode,” Rothstein said. “It wasn’t just single line newsprint, and balsa or Tyvek. Two-line and four-line kites were created to add to the spectacle, and those designs kept getting refined over the years.”

A 1986 article in The Oregonian credited Kip Ward, then director of the Lincoln City Chamber of Commerce, with the idea of branding the coastal city as the “Kite Capital of the World,” a designation that was enshrined by a City Council proclamation that year for the ninth annual kite festival.

The name – and reputation – stuck.

David Gomberg, now the state representative for District 10 on the Oregon coast, is a past president of the American Kitefliers Association, an inductee of the Kitefliers Hall of Fame, the founder of kite designer and manufacturer Gomberg Kite Productions International, and a past director of the Lincoln City Chamber of Commerce.

“If you look up and down the coast, different communities have different things going on,” Gomberg said. “You’ve got sandcastle contests, you’ve got music festivals, you’ve got wine and seafood festivals, and Lincoln City’s identity grew up around the kite festivals.”

Kites filled the sky during the 2014 Summer Kite Festival in Lincoln City.

LC- Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

‘Most perfect conditions’

Gomberg Kite Productions closed in 2020, and the last Catch the Wind store closed in 2010. But the Lincoln City Kite Festival continues to grow.

The town has remained a popular kiting destination, in part because of its location. Lincoln City sits directly on the 45th parallel, halfway between the North Pole and the Equator in an area that produces some of the most reliable winds of the northern hemisphere.

“The left coast is about the most perfect (kiting) conditions you can find in the world, next to the Cape Verde Islands west of Africa,” Rothstein said.

And Lincoln City’s seven miles of sandy beaches and ocean-fresh winds made it an ideal kite flying retreat.

“Part of it is just having one of the most popular and largest wayside parks right there in the middle of town,” Gomberg said. “You could get out of your car and be on the beach a moment later with a kite in your hand.”

But location alone does not make a successful event. Rothstein also credits “a core group of volunteers who just give their all for it” for keeping the event alive, along with the support of Explore Lincoln City, the tourism organization that now runs the festivals.

Brewer, now 72, still volunteers with the Lincoln City Kite Festival today. It’s like a reunion, she said, for kite enthusiasts from across the country.

The two-day kite festivals in summer and fall are exhibitions with two fields of kites. One houses a “wind garden” display of massive kites, some in shapes of dragons or crabs, that create a spectacle across the sky. The other, called the demo field, is where trick kite fliers show off their skills in a kind of aerial ballet.

Spectators are not allowed to fly kites within the festival area, but the benefit of Lincoln City’s long beaches is that there’s plenty of space to the north and south of the roped off kite fields for novices to take flight.

Kites filled the sky during the 2014 Summer Kite Festival in Lincoln City.

Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

If you go

The

Lincoln City Summer Kite Festival

is from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. June 21-22 at the D River State Recreation Site. Featured fliers will perform throughout each day. Children can make a paper kite to take home from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. daily. Pixie Fest Carnival Games operate daily. Admission is free.

Parking is available at the Lincoln City Community Center and the top level of the parking structure at the Lincoln City Outlets. Free shuttle service is available at both locations and runs regularly from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. daily.

The Fall Kite Festival will be 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Sept. 20-21, with a special “Lighted Night Fly” from 7 to 9 p.m. Sept. 19.

For more information, visit

explorelincolncity.com/events

.

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