Rocket motors to ways to view butterfly wings, all are included in a Brainerd store that is all about air.
Air Hobbies, which opened on Laurel Street in downtown Brainerd this spring, has an open store front and windows filled with colorful kites of massive wingspans. Inside the store, a picnic table displays other kite options and continues an informal atmosphere.
Owner Pete Bergman, dressed in yellow shirt and red suspenders, easily chatted with passers-by. He started his hobby business in September in the Seventh Street Mall in downtown Brainerd. But Bergman said he had little options for display there.
He said the retail space was about the same, but the exposure to the glass front of the Laurel Street location can be measured directly from the increased amount of people who have wandered into the store. Outside a colorful pinwheel and a duck move easily in the breeze and stand out on a sidewalk sign announcing the business is open.
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Disc golf, one of the games featured at Air Hobbies, is a growing recreation area. Air Hobbies owner Pete Bergman said Minnesota is in the top two or three states in the nation for number of courses and players. There is a free course at Lum Park in Brainerd.
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Customers walked in looking for paint guns. Another looked at model airplanes and said as a youngster growing up in World War II those planes inspired model building that he has not been involved in lately. But he was interested in starting again.
In response, Bergman had a wealth of information on vintage World War II planes.
"Our inventory keeps expanding and growing," Bergman said, seated on the picnic table. "I have more or less kept with the air theme."
The theme includes box kites, plane kites, balsam and stick plane models, air guns, rockets, and even a few black leather coats because Bergman said the air gets cold up there. Store shelves also contain rock tumblers and magic kits.
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Pete Bergman expects buoyant business from his new store, which specializes in selling just about anything to do with air opened its doors on Laurel Street this spring to a store front with greater visibility than its former downtown Brainerd location in the Seventh Street Mall.
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"How airy could you get as magic," Bergman said.
There are also books on related topics, military aircraft pins and tools for model building.
Bergman's sense of humor is displayed in the form of a little snowman on a target at his little shooting range where customers can try out air guns. A retrievable target lets shooters judge their score. The snowman on the target, if hit often enough, helps delay the start of winter, Bergman said.
Bergman also offers blow guns and traction kites, which are similar to soft parafoil kites but much larger -- up to 15-feet wide -- that are big enough to tow a person on skis or in-line skates.
The store, open afternoons and early evenings as well as Saturdays, carries and sells kites all year. Bergman said people came in during the winter and bought kites to take to fishing houses on frozen lakes.
"It was my interest in air guns that prompted me to start," Bergman said of the business. The former office machine service and supply businessman who had a Rochester in the 1970s said he thought of opening the business when another Brainerd hobby shop closed. He spent a lot of his youth in Arkansas and Missouri and came back to live in Minnesota after teaching school in Honduras.
As for the air gun inspiration in the business, Bergman said about a half dozen Olympic events are based on the guns. And 4-Hers use them in marksmanship and safety training. He also has knock-down field targets that he cuts out in the back room.
"Air gun is one of the fastest growing segment of the shooting sports," Bergman said.
Another growing area is disc golf where players use a disc, like a Frisbee, to play a course. Bergman started selling the discs in May and said it is an unusual day when he does not sell some.
