LEADER OF THE PACK; KELTY'S INVENTION GOT CARRIED AWAY.

Byline: Eric Noland Daily News Staff Writer

The concept of necessity as the mother of invention was weighing heavily on Dick Kelty.

And weighing awkwardly. And weighing painfully. Jutting into his back, digging into the tops of his shoulders, bending him double.

This was 50 years ago, when Kelty, a Glendale carpenter, was venturing into the Sierra Nevada Mountains on extended hiking trips, lugging the only equipment available - surplus GI packs from World War II that were bulky, unwieldy . . . and torturous as he ascended steep ridges.

Kelty's discomfort gave rise to experimentation in his garage, and ultimately to a backpack that was the forerunner to just about everything you'll see on the trail this summer.

``When I was growing up in the '60s, I remember so well my patrol leader having a Kelty,'' said Ron Schoenmehl, today a regional executive for the Boy Scouts. ``I was just entering my teen-age years. I'd be wearing my canvas pack with a lousy frame, and I just envied him.''

Kelty, living in retirement with his wife Nena in Glendale's Chevy Chase Canyon, will chuckle at the story, but he otherwise seems uncomfortable discussing his legacy. Any attempt to draw him out will undoubtedly result in a self-effacing joke and a remark that the design innovations ``would have happened a year or two later, whether we started the business or not. I think we triggered it a bit.''

It's clear he's proud of what he accomplished, though.

``I was watching a thing on KCET a while ago,'' he said the other day. ``It was about some guys who were studying grizzly bears in Alaska. And two of the guys were wearing old Kelty packs. I get a little kick out of that.''

It's also fun for him and Nena to recall the early days of trial and error, and of tentatively launching a business that grew solely out of consumer demand.

``What came about,'' he said, ``was an evolution of fiddling around with things.''

Kelty spent $5, he said, to buy his first GI surplus rucksack. It was made of canvas and had steel poles. And ``that pack nearly killed me'' the first time he took it out.

He first replaced the steel poles with hardwood flooring, boiling and bending the strips. A critical innovation followed.

Kelty was hiking with a friend, Clay Seaman, and to ease the load on their shoulders, each would take ahold of the wood side members and lift them slightly. Tiring even of this, Seaman set the ends of his side members into the hip pockets of his jeans.

Instant comfort. The brunt of the load had been shifted to the hips, which resulted in much less wear on the body. But how to secure it there snugly?

Kelty attached a waist strap to the base of the frame. It seemed to do the trick.

It was one of many design wrinkles.

Lightweight nylon replaced the heavy canvas - there was plenty of it available in surplus parachutes. Another material that hadn't been readily available during the war, aluminum, was substituted for the wood in the frame. Carpet remnants were snipped into strips to cushion the shoulder straps.

``He'd go on a trip into the mountains and come back with an idea for changing some little thing,'' Nena said.

On the GI pack, the load was carried low, and tended to pull away from the body, forcing the hiker to hunch forward. Kelty designed his frames to hug the back and bear the weight higher - this father of two had already learned that it's easier to carry a child up on the shoulders than on piggyback.

The pack itself was narrowed, to conform more closely to shoulder width, while the use of multiple compartments enabled a hiker to distribute gear so that the load was more balanced.

Soon, however, word of the clever innovations spread. Friends asked Kelty to make them one of his packs. A stranger showed up at the door one day saying he'd like one.

Kelty decided to backlog a few and place a small ad in the Sierra Club quarterly newsletter. ``I came home one day from my carpentry job,'' he said, ``and Nena said, `I've sold all the packs.' ''

Westways magazine ran a piece on backpacking in which the writer raved about his Kelty pack. The family's home phone number was included in the writeup. It began to ring a lot.

Those were heady, hectic times.

Dick made the frames in the garage, at first washing them in the bathtub. Nena made the packs on her sewing machine until demand required that they buy two commercial sewing machines and cram them side by side in their dining room.

``I cut the nylon on our Formica table,'' Dick says, shooting a glance across the room at his wife. ``I ruined that table, didn't I?''

After the business was launched in '52, the Keltys sold 29 packs the first year, 90 the next, 220 the year after that.

In '56, Dick quit his carpentry job, rented a former barber shop on San Fernando Road and hired the company's first paid employee, a seamstress.

Six years later, as Baby Boomers began swelling the ranks of Scout troops, the operation moved to a larger building on Victory Boulevard and still later expanded to a factory in Sun Valley.

It was quite a success story, but it also began to take quite a toll on the perfectionist who launched it.

``I always took the business very seriously,'' Kelty said. ``I put in more hours than common sense would dictate.''

He had two heart surgeries. In the wake of them, he found he couldn't much handle the high altitude of the mountains he loved. Not that he had time to indulge the passion anymore.

``People would come into the store,'' Nena said, ``and they'd want to see Dick. He'd come out from the back and they'd talk about where they'd been, how the pack had done. He'd have to stand there and listen all about their exciting trips.''

Dick: ``Everything. How the fishing was. How the flowers looked.''

Nena: ``And here he had to make packs.''

When the pack bears your name, you feel guilty sneaking off to a trout stream or an alpine meadow and leaving the quality control to others. And Kelty admits he placed an inordinately high priority on that aspect of the business.

Mickey Chandler, former vice president of merchandise for the Sport Chalet chain in Southern California, said of Kelty: ``He kept to basics, and those packs were indestructible.

``We had a customer who had hung the pack up in a tree with his food in it, and a bear had ripped out the side pockets. The pack was eight years old, and it was obvious abuse by a bear.

``We sent it out for repair and Kelty sent back a new pack. He replaced it! Most companies would prorate it, but Kelty felt so strongly about his warranty that he sent us a new one. So here this customer put the new pack on his eight-year-old frame.

``I remember writing Kelty and asking what was the charge. He wrote back, `No charge.' ''

Today, when he stops into a sporting goods store, Kelty can't resist taking a peek at the packs, even the ones manufactured by the company that now holds the Kelty trademark, Kellwood.

``It boggles my mind, all the things they have now - and don't really need,'' he said. ``All the dangling straps and buckles and things that require very intricate sewing. It bothers me a little bit to see the bells and whistles - I don't know how else to say it. . . .

``So many of the packs I look at are packs you'd get for an expedition, to climb Mt. Everest or something. But most are not doing that. They're just going to the Sierra for a day.''

Indeed. Most are taking a short trip in the mountains, where the hiker requires only something simple, sturdy, designed for comfort and efficiency.

Dick Kelty can speak with authority on the subject, for it was on these excursions that his ideas for exactly this kind of a pack began to germinate.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

PHOTO (1-color) ``What came about was an evolution of fiddling around with things,'' says Glendale's Dick Kelty, who transformed a GI surplus rucksack into his own creation in the late '50s.

(2) ``It boggles my mind, all the things they have now - and don't really need . . . It bothers me a little bit to see the bells and whistles - I don't know how else to say it.''

-- Dick Kelty, whose own backpacks bear his name on the tags

John McCoy / Daily News