The fastest sled in northern Delaware

A Flexible-Flyer. (Compliments of the Museum of Toys.)

Back about 1960-’61, when I was 16/17, I owned the fastest sled in northern DE.
It was my father’s Flexible-Flyer.
It was much more flexible than originally designed, since my father had broken both siderails, and repaired them by wrapping them in string.
A Flexible-Flyer is steerable. A bar in front bent the runners to turn. But my father’s repair meant the runners could bend much more than originally designed.
And apparently he used it enough to make it extremely fast.
My sister’s boyfriend, who later became her first husband, whom she later divorced, bought a sled that would supposedly skonk mine.
But if we started together, I was usually 30 yards ahead of him over 100 yards; and usually finished about 50 yards farther than him when we finally coasted to a stop.
He was crestfallen. He tried everything to make his sled faster than mine, but nothing worked.
He waxed the runners. I didn’t hafta do that.
We sledded various locations. Best was a golf-coarse near where I lived.
The hill was terraced. We did jumps.
We also had to watch out for sand-traps — difficult to see in the dark.
It was brutally cold. We came in a friend’s old ’48 Chevy fastback. We had to scrape the frost off the inside of the windshield.
Nothing beat my father’s old Flexible-Flyer. It was indeed the fastest sled in northern DE.
Our most dangerous adventure was sledding in Brandywine Park in central Wilmington, DE.
Again it was brutally cold.
It was dangerous because our sledding-hill, the path down to the Brandywine River, crossed the road down into the park twice.
That road was little traveled, especially when icy in Winter, but sometimes we had to divert = crash into the snow-berm to stop.
Not much sledding took place in Brandywine Park. That sledding trail was a concrete walkway, and patches of bare concrete could stop our sledding.
The other guy was also more interested in submarine races with a pretty blond named Sandy.
Not me, of course, since I am a graduate of the Hilda Q. Walton School of Sexual Relations, such that I was totally unworthy of female attention.
My father’s Flexible-Flyer was triumphant a while, but finally one night I crashed a terrace at that golf-coarse.
I pulled out the runner on one whole side of the sled. My sled could no longer be the fastest sled in northern DE.

• From age-13 on I was a resident of a suburb north of Wilmington, DE.