ON TOP OF THE WORLD!
There is no feeling created by Disney engineers that quite equals the joyous exhilaration youngsters feel when they find they can actually walk on stilts!
Suddenly, you are eight feet tall!
The cumbersome hulk of the Earth no longer tugs at you. You are a bird in flight, or a wisp of free air sweeping over vast spaces!
Stilts are said to have been “developed” rather than ”invented” may centuries ago as a practical means of helping French shepherds to move about more readily on swampy, marsh land areas. It was found that a good pair of stilts, skillfully used, also vastly improved his lookout status, giving him a far broader range of sight.
My only pair of stilts I ever had and the only ones I ever needed, were hand made by my Grandfather John Loeffert at the Box Factory he owned and operated in South Norfolk, Virginia (now called Chesapeake).They were sturdy and had three levels built-in. There were metal rods at one, two and three foot levels, set between two uprights into which the “feet” where clamped by inserting a sliding hook into the slot and putting a bit of weight on The level could be changed easily changed by inverting the stilt; pounding on the step to loosen the grip it had on the internal rod and replacing it in the desired, new level.
My brother Al and I learned to walk easily, as I remember it, at the lower level, a least. Then we advanced the two foot level and that became our standard, operational level. We started low, for safety reasons, and I can can still hear our parents cautioning us not to walk at the three-foot level”: “You'll break your urned fool necks!”
We ran races, including relay carrying various hard-to-hold objects such as a tray with cups of water on it, we became adept at exchanging stilts with someone else without dismounting, playing hop-scotch and other games.
To rise above the world of land-bound creatures; to feel the head-in-the-clouds sensation, every kid should have the opportunity to do some serious stilting.
I wonder if they will ever come back and be as popular as they were years ago. If Hula Hoops and Yo-Yo's can make it, certainly there is hope for stilts.
A L.M April 19, 2003 [c646wds]
