Kite Personalities - George Ham

Colorful, friendly, loquacious, George Ham is known as the Mayor of Marina Green, the lovely field in San Francisco where boats, bay and breeze combine in a picture postcard site for flying kites. Ham holds forth on Sundays, flying his patchwork parafoils and conversing with all comers, including the many foreigners attracted to the Green. He's hard to miss in his flamboyant sartorial getup—huge jade belt buckle, turquoise tie clasp, gunslinger sunglasses and jade-­decorated cowboy hat, the latter now important to the septuagenar­ian for keeping the sun at bay. The gems in his getup reflect an earlier hobby, jewelry-making.

Ham made kites as a boy while growing up in the Midwest but forgot them during his working career in shipyards and as a hardwood floor installer. He came back to kites when he saw his first parafoil flying in 1976 and told his wife: "I have to have one of those." Advice from the inventor of the kite himself, Domina Jalbert, followed, and soon Ham, always handy with his hands, was an expert too. Leland Toy’s self-published newsletter in the late 1970’s gave kite enthusiasts a glimpse into George’s workshop when he described in detail the Rube-Goldberg system for sewing accuracy. Ham's master­piece is a 66-square footer he crafted from 2,766 pieces of fabric. It took him eighteen months to build. He also designed a 3,640-square-foot monster built and flown in 1980 by students at Edmond 's Community College in Seattle that, for a time, held the Guinness Book of World Records mark for largest kite.

As a teacher of kite making, Ham is proud to count as protégés some top figures in the sport, including Lee Toy, Brock Parsons, Bonnie and Ed Wright, and Denmark 's Jørgen Møller Hansen. With the advent of noisy sport kites, gawkers wanting to talk, earthquake damage, and a change in weather patterns so that the old reliable 2 p.m. breeze now blows in erratically, Marina Green is a bit different than in the 1980s. But Ham happily continues his role as honorary mayor. “Hand a kite string to a person and you get a smile. Kites are a wonderful way to relate to people, and I love people.”

Adapted from an article in 1991 Kite Pin Invitational, a Drachen Foundation publication (1995)