Charles, age 68, runs workshops in libraries, schools and community centers to teach children and families how to make and fly kites. His favorite project was showing a class of 21 third graders how to construct a Butterfly kite, and getting photos of all their kites and a thank you note in the mail.

Up close, most Americans, they only know diamond kites. That's what I was familiar with up until '96, when someone dragged me to a kite festival, and I found kiting has moved light years from the little 10-cent kites and making kites from newspapers and stuff. I call it my last great hobby. There's so many dimensions to it: single line kites, two-line controllable kites, fighter kites—you can dig it anyway you like!

One of the things I like most about running kite workshops is working with children, and their inquisitiveness, and hearing the same questions over and over again. It even reminds me a bit of myself sometimes and it really makes me smile: it makes me think, yeah, that's a question I would have asked! And I never get tired of answering them, because you look at them and you see in their eyes that they're not kidding you: they don't know, and they're asking you to find out.

I'm interested in everything about kites—everything you can find, out there, I learned how to fly. Fighters are the last I've learned. It's hard to break this habit of pulling backwards when you want it to go up. But with a fighter kite, wherever it's pointed, it'll go when you pull it. So if the kite is pointed to the ground when you pull it, that's where it'll go!

I think fighters are the most fun! If you're not doing something with the kite, it'll do something on it's own! In other words, you gotta keep flying it all the time. They're very interactive. If the wind is very soft, you fly very differently than if the wind is very fast. It's like a game with the wind. And when you put another kite up there, it's a game with an opponent and the wind!