Job’s a Breeze: He Gets Paid for Flying Kites

It started out as just a summer job, one that made his friends on both coasts of the United States burst out laughing when he told them about it.

Kent Horner, 17, of Mission Viejo is a senior at Mission Viejo High School this fall, “but I’m going to keep on working afternoons and weekends,” he said.

And why not? He gets paid for flying kites.

“A lot of my friends here just stare at me and laugh when I tell them,” he said. “Even when we went back on a visit to Bowie in Maryland where we used to live, and I told the kids I live 10 minutes from the beach out here and have a summer job flying kites, they laughed, too.”

It began last Christmas season, when Jim Bates, owner of Pacific Winds Kite Co., had a display at Mission Viejo Mall.

“I just talked to him and helped him a little and went around with him to other malls at Santa Ana and Buena Park and learned a little about the kite business,” Horner said. “Then I started out with him as just a two-day-a-week summer job. But since he opened the shop a few weeks ago in the new Pavilion area at Lantern Bay right by Dana Point Harbor, I’m here almost every day.”

It seems the wind blows at Dana Point most of the time, even when not a leaf is stirring elsewhere. The breezes are a delight for sailors, wind surfers and, of course, kite fliers on the grassy acres of Lantern Bay Park overlooking the harbor and the ocean.

The park, which opened less than two years ago, has become one of the most popular kite-flying spots in Southern California. Office workers, carpenters and truck drivers alike are there every weekday with their lunch bags and kites.

And then there’s Horner.

Every kite that is ordered for sale in the shop must be tested. So Horner, with an armload of new kites, walks up the 118 concrete steps to the top of the bluff three or four times a day.

“That’s a lot of steps, but I like the job because I meet a lot of people, even when I’m in the shop helping customers,” he said.

Although the youth said that he definitely is going to college when he finishes high school, he has no specific career plans, and gives only a vague hint that his future might somehow be connected to kites.

One measure of his affinity for kites is financial: He spent $75--at wholesale prices--to buy an eight-foot stunt kite, the kind that has two control strings and can be made to swoop and dart and loop-the-loop.

“That’s a powerful kite,” he said. “Once, in a 25-m.p.h. wind, it dragged me right across the grass on the seat of my pants.”