Many of us can remember the fun times in winter as children, taking a running start, or getting a push from a friend, and experiencing the exhilaration as we flew down a hill, on our wooden sleds.

If your sled was a Lightning Guider, it was made in Duncannon, Perry County, Pennsylvania.

ExplorePAhistory.com, the state’s historical marker program, provides background on the formation of the Standard Novelty Works, and funds to purchase lumber for those sleds.

"A charter has been granted the Standard Novelty Works, of Duncannon, with a capital of $5,060. The incorporators are C.A. Walter, of Mifflinburg; P.F. of Duncannon, Wm. Wills, of Duncannon. A contract has already been awarded the Newport Planing Mill for $8,000 worth of seat boards for steel sleds which will be the specialty of these works." TOWN AND COUNTRY, New Bloomfield, PA, August 03, 1904 [1]

Five years earlier, a Philadelphia businessman, S.L. Allen, began production of his “Flexible Flyer.”

In 1889 Allen introduced his "Flexible Flyer." Its runners were purposely made a little weaker in the middle, so they could be more easily bent, making it easier to steer. A slatted wooden surface made it lighter and easier to carry. Allen intended his factory workers to make sleds in the slow months of the year, when they weren't producing farm equipment. But his salesmen balked at having to work at all during their normal "vacation" season.[2]

In 1899 Allen undertook a concentrated advertising campaign. Wanamaker's in Philadelphia and Macy's in New York took on the Flexible Flyer line in time for Christmas that year, selling "Boys' Flexible Flyers" for $1.99. [3]

As Flexible Flyer prospered, so did other sled companies in Pennsylvania, including Duncannon's Standard Novelty Works. The 30,000-foot factory came on line in 1904, producing "Lightning Guiders" and "Challengers," and operated for eighty-six years. In the 1920s and 1930s, when American children made Balto the Sled Dog a veritable hero, the company produced up to 1,800 sleds per day, more than any other American manufacturer. [4]

Balto (c. 1919 – March 14, 1933) was an Alaskan husky and sled dog belonging to musher and breeder Leonhard Seppala. He achieved fame when he led a team of sled dogs driven by Gunnar Kaasen on the final leg of the 1925 serum run to Nome, in which diphtheria antitoxin was transported from Anchorage, Alaska, to Nenana, Alaska, by train and then to Nome by dog sled, to combat an outbreak of the disease. Balto's celebrity status, and that of Kaasen's, resulted in a two-reel motion picture, a statue in Central Park, and a nationwide tour on the vaudeville circuit.[4]

The March 29, 1926 edition of the Duncannon Record talked about the importance that the Standard Novelty Works had in the community.

“What does a Christmas or early winter snow throughout the country mean to Duncannon? Nothing, you will say at first thought. Yet in our midst we have the Standard Novelty Works, home of the famous Lightning Guider sleds. The management thereof find that the average boy and girl wants a sled for Christmas, but why a sled without snow. And so with a winter like the one which just closed, with early snows, it seriously affects the sled business. The Novelty Works is the only industry in town employing men exclusively and their employment of from 30 to 60 men means more to our town than the average person might think.

In the 1960s there were eight sled manufacturers in the United States. A decade later, only three were left: Standard Novelty, Flexible Flyer, and The Gladding Corporation of Maine. By the late 1970s, both Standard Novelty and Flexible Flyer were still having banner years, selling 100,000 and 500,000 sleds, respectively, for that season.

But by 1990, the owners of the Lightning group, which had purchased the Standard Novelty Company from its original owners, decided to close the business.

Owner Norman Rosen told a newspaper editor that too many mild winters and societal changes halted production on the once popular Lightning Guider. He said, “Basically, the kids don’t want to go outside and play in the snow anymore. Today there’s a lot of other things to do.”

So ended a business begun 86 years earlier in Duncannon, a business that had provided several generations of fun, swooshing downhill on the Lightning Guider.