I first met Mickey Kinley in 1981 while I was living in West Palm Beach, Florida. I had introduced a neighbor to boomerangs a few months earlier. My friend, Jim MacNeil, was throwing one of his Gerhards hooks in a big field in Boca Raton adjacent to the Florida Atlantic University campus. Suddenly, a man who had been playing golf in the distance started yelling and running towards Jim. Jim met an excited Mickey Kinley who introduced himself as a new boomerang thrower. Mickey was a furniture maker by profession and Mickey had started making strip laminated traditional boomerangs on his own. He had never seen anything like a Gerhards hook. Mickey begged Jim to loan him the Gerhards hook for a day so he could make a copy. Jim and I met Mickey on the following day. Mickey met us with an arm load of his strip laminated traditionals and a single copy of the Gerhards hook. This was a PERFECT COPY, complete with weights! The only problem was that it didn't return. I was not yet an expert at tuning and Mickey decided to adjust the flight by filing down the airfoils using instructions from the Lorin Hawes book. That poor hook was filed down until there was almost nothing left and it still would not return. It was so thin that it eventually broke. The following year, I moved from West Palm Beach to Ohio, but I stayed in touch with Mickey. In 1983, Mickey sent me samples of his strip laminated hooks and omegas. These were absolutely beautiful and were weighted. They had a flight range of 75 - 100 metres. These were good returners, but they had a slight tendency to spiral out of a stable hover at the end of the flight if not thrown just right. This was easily corrected by adding some tape flaps to slow the rotation down a bit. In 1984, Mickey moved on to make Boomalums, the first long distance boomerangs made out of Aluminum. Mickey is a famous and early pioneer in the long distance event. His name doesn't show up in the record books because he rarely went to tournaments, but his boomalums were the boomerangs of choice in the long distance event for many throwers throughout the 1980s.

This is an early example of the famous Boomalum, made out of Aluminum, from the early 1980s. This model was one of the easiest to throw and for achieving flights exceeding 100 yards, but you needed some tuning skill to use this model because Aluminum can bend and detune with a hard landing. This is the medium sized Boomalum. Small ones and heavier ones were also made, but this model was my favorite of the series. For safety, Mickey recommended spray painting the surface with flourescent orange paint. This one does not have any paint, but it is in excellent condition. This boomerang should not be thrown by anyone not skilled in the art of long distance throwing. It is an excellent collectable and hard to find, especially in this condition. Originally from the Brian Thomas estate.