Glibertarians.com 2019 Archive

Author: Animal

  • Allamakee County Chronicles VIII: Hold My Beer!

    Note:  A prologue from my upcoming autobiography, Life’s Too Short to Smoke Cheap Cigars (Or to Drink Cheap Whiskey.)

    You Ever Wonder Why…

    It’s well known that teenage boys are driven by testosterone; your typical teenage boy is basically a pair of testicles with legs, and I was certainly no exception.  At this sensitive age boys are prone to doing stupid things, sometimes to impress girls (that rarely works out like intended) or sometimes just because.

    Country kids, of course, have many opportunities to risk life and limb in pursuit of… well, who knows?  I certainly don’t.  Back then, in the glory days of the late Seventies back in Allamakee County, I didn’t know either.  And that probably explains a lot.

    This One Time…

    One of those “just because” times came in the autumn of 1976.  My grandfather had passed away the year before, and my grandmother was preparing to pass off the big farmhouse to my uncle and move into a smaller structure on the property, and so had been clearing out a lot of my late grandfather’s stuff.

    By the early November day when my cousin Jeff and I went out to the farm to shoot some pheasants, most of Grandpa’s stuff was already gone, but after we had knocked over a few birds, we went in to the house where Grandma had offered to feed us lunch.  As we were eating, Grandma let us know about the few things left.

    “Boys,” she told us, “out in the barn, there are a couple of old boxes of Grandad’s things.  You two go look through them when you’re done eating.  If there’s anything you want, take it; I’m going to have your uncle Norman haul all the rest to the dump.”

    So, once we finished eating, we went back outside.  We stood in the drive for a few moments.  As Jeff was lighting a cigarette, I walked over and poked my head in the small entry door on the side of the barn.

    “Hey,” I told Jeff, “there’s a couple boxes in there, just like Grandma said.”

    “Well, let’s have a look,” Jeff responded.

    Old dynamite. Fortunately we didn’t find this much.

    There wasn’t much of any use in the boxes.  As I recall at this distance in time, there was a small stash of Grandpa’s girlie magazines that gave us a chuckle (a few years later I was mildly horrified when I suddenly realized why Grandpa kept that stash in the barn and not the house), a broken socket wrench and, down in the bottom of one of the boxes, two old sticks of dynamite.

    Lots of folks who haven’t worked with explosives don’t know that old dynamite sweats.  This isn’t sweat in the human sense, it’s more like an old D-cell battery breaking open.  A gritty, crystalline white crust exudes from the paper covering of the dynamite sticks, eventually heavily covering the stick.  The main substance of that gritty crust?  Nitroglycerine.

    This, understandably, makes these old sticks of dynamite tetchy to handle.

    Now, then and there, the smart thing to do would have been to leave the sticks where they were, to tell Uncle Norman, who was taking over the farm, about them, and leave him to find someone experienced and equipped to deal with these hazardous objects.  But not us – oh, no, not us!

    Holding one of the sticks, my cousin looked at me.  “Hey,” he said, “I’ve got my .22 in my truck.  I wonder if these would go off if we shot ‘em?”

    Jeff was four years older than me, and, I assumed, wiser.  So, my reply seemed obvious: “Let’s find out!”

    Some instinct made us go a good way from the house before commencing our experiment, so once Jeff retried his old .22 bolt gun, we walked through the orchard and out to the far side of the south cornfield.  There we propped the sweaty old dynamite sticks up against a dirt clod, backed off about fifty yards and commenced experimenting.

    We each had fired off a five-round magazine at the two sticks with no result.  After carefully approaching the sticks, we saw several inarguable bullet holes through them.  But no explosion had commenced.

    It was this moment that Jeff realized the real, physical danger of what we were doing.  “You know,” he said, “if Grandma hears the .22 and comes out here and sees what we’re doing, she’ll cut a switch and wallop the tar of us both.”

    Jeff and I were big tough country boys.  Jeff was about 5’10”, maybe 160 pounds, and hard as rock; at fifteen, I was already a six-footer pushing 200 pounds and could easily toss around 75-pound hay bales.  Grandma was 4’10”, weighed maybe a hundred pounds soaking wet, and was in her middle seventies, and we had no doubt whatsoever that she could beat the hell out of us both without breaking a sweat – or that she would certainly do so if she figured out what we were up to.

    “Yeah,” I agreed.  “We’d better do the smart thing, I guess.”

    So, Jeff got a shovel from the tool shed, we dug a four-foot deep hole in the fencerow and buried those two sticks, tamping the dirt down good and hard and scattering dry leaves over the filled hole.  Nothing more was said about the incident by either of us for many years, and as far as we know nobody ever got blown up, so presumably the damp earth rendered the dynamite, eventually, inert.

    I’m no expert on dynamite, though.  For all I know those sticks, buried in the ground all these years, may well still be ert.  Personally, even now, I don’t think I’d go back and try digging in that fencerow, but then there’s lots of things I wouldn’t do nowadays.

    Youth, Testosterone and Beer

    Now, add a couple years and some beer to the mix.

    Back in these days, the age of majority for almost everything was still eighteen.  I could buy beer at eighteen, any kind of alcohol for that matter, which resulted in my being a legal drinker through most of my senior year of high school.  This was the cause of some consternation on the part of teachers, especially since my high school had open campus for seniors.  We generally went downtown for lunch, usually grabbing a sandwich and a brew at one of the local taverns.

    “These boys are coming to afternoon classes smelling of beer!” the teachers protested to the principal.  Bear in mind that this was a time when some semblance of common sense still held sway in a significant portion of the population.  So, the principal’s reply was, shall we say, principled; “Are they drunk?”

    “No,” the teachers replied.

    “Are they disruptive?”

    “No.”

    “They’re legal.  If they have a beer with lunch, and they’re paying attention after that, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

    The teachers withdrew their complaints, we went on having a beer or two with lunch, and everybody was, if not content, at least accepting the inevitable.

    On schooldays at lunch, see, we were mostly responsible.  But add girls to the mix!  That’s when the old saying about “hold my beer and watch this” really gains some traction.

    At This Dance…

    The actual by-gosh Highlandville General Store.

    Fast forward to the summer after I was manumitted from high school.  That summer of 1980 I was working at some odd jobs (bouncer, car repo guy, various farm jobs) while I tried to decide what to do next.  But the highlights of that long-ago summer took place in the little town of Highlandville, about six miles from the Old Man’s place.  That little unincorporated village contained an old one-room schoolhouse that had been converted into a little social center and, that summer, there were danced there every Saturday night.  There was always a local band, usually a few unofficial kegs of beer in crates of ice, and local farm boys and girls from miles around came in to check out the other farm girls and boys.

    One particular Saturday found my folks leaving to go to an Audubon Society conference down in Decorah.  Dad was annoyed with me for some reason I can’t recall and so, when he and Mom left in Mom’s car, he took the keys to his pickup.  He knew my old 66 Ford’s gas tank was dry as a fart and the big gas tank out by the shed was likewise empty, and so presumed I’d be left to sit out a Saturday night at home.

    But there was one thing he forgot.

    After the folks left, I walked around a little bit, grumbling to myself and considering possibilities.  It was a beautiful July afternoon getting along towards evening; the afternoon heat was giving way to the cool of the evening, and the cicadas were still calling from the big box-elders along the driveway; a perfect evening to find a girl and enjoy some of the finer things in my eighteen-year-old life.

    For a few mad moments I considered getting my old bike out of the shed and riding it to Highlandville, but I would not garner any respect from the other local kids if  I had to resort to that, and so dismissed the idea out of hand.  It was too far to walk, and I wasn’t interested in driving the tractor that far.

    Then, as I stood irresolutely in the yard, a bright light dawned:  It was the sun, glancing off the windshield of Dad’s 1954 F-500 six-yard dump truck, parked in the orchard.

    I hopped in.  The old truck, being an unlicensed farm vehicle that had nevertheless seen many years of hard use on northeast Iowa’s graveled roads and farm fields, didn’t have a conventional ignition switch any more, the key switch being replaced by a simple old Radio Shack toggle.  To start the truck, one had to flip the toggle to On, pump the gas pedal three times – not twice, not four times, but three times – and then step on the starter button on the floor, at which point the truck’s old 312 Y-block engine would cough, sputter and come to life with a flatulent roar.

    The actual by-gosh old Highlandville schoolhouse.

    At least, it did so on this occasion.  I had been driving the truck for several years already, hauling dirt and gravel for various jobs around the place, and so was already well familiar with its operation.  I crawled the old vehicle out to the road, stuck the two-speed rear axle in High, and headed for town.

    I arrived without incident.  The old dumper, parked at the edge of the parking lot, occasioned some comment from the dancegoers, but otherwise my evening went well.  I danced with a few girls, drank more than a few beers.

    About ten o’clock, having had no luck with the local girls at the dance, I went outside to grab a beer.  A group of local rowdies were gathered around the keg in the back of Miles Duffy’s pickup.  As I was filling my cup, one of them asked me, “Hey, are you the guy who drove the dump truck in?”

    “Yup,” I agreed.  “Was either that or walk.”

    “I hear ya,” he agreed easily.  He drained his beer at a single pull.  “Say,” he went on, “if a fella was to climb in the back of that, and you were to dump it out, how long you reckon a guy could hang on?”

    “I can’t think of but one way to find out,” I answered.

    We found out.  Not one guy but about six climbed in the back of the truck.  I started the old monster up and, after letting the engine run a moment to build up hydraulic pressure, pulled the knob to dump the box out.

    Not actually Dad’s dumper, but much the same.

    Bear in mind that this vehicle, like a lot of old dumpers, had a tailgate that was hinged not at the bottom but at the top, allowing it to swing open at the bottom to release the contents.  I had undogged the latches on the tailgate before climbing in the cab.  As the box upended, I heard scrabbling as the fellows tried to hold on to the rusty surface of the dump box, and then sliding sounds, followed by a few hard thumps as a couple of them hit the tailgate hard before sliding out.

    Leaving the engine running, I climbed out to see the results.  The first guy to have the idea had a welt on his forehead and a swelling under one eye that looked like it would turn into a beautiful shiner.  “Hey!” he yelled.  “Let’s go again!  I think I can do better!”

    We ended up trying it four or five times.  At one point I tried a run in the back myself and managed to slide out without breaking any bones.

    None of the local gals were impressed, of course, even though at the time we young guys had considered it a serious possibility that they would be.  Eventually an older fellow, certainly on the wrong side of twenty and therefore expected to be responsible, walked over and pointed out, “you know, if you guys keep doing that, someone is gonna get hurt.”

    We all looked at each other, with our collection of bruises, scrapes, cuts and sprains, and agreed that he was likely right.

    Thus, ended the great dump truck experiment.  Eventually, girl-less and bruised, I finished my last beer, climbed in the old dumper, put the axle in Low to keep the speed down to match my impaired reflexes, and guided the waddling, farting old beast back home.

    As It Stands

    Many years later I told my Mom of the incident, one in a series of things that I revealed to the folks after enough years had passed that they would hopefully find the stories amusing rather than enraging.  I had generally been surprised to find out how much they already knew of my escapades, but that one they weren’t too sure of, although Mom remembered one time when they came back from a weekend in town when Dad swore the dump truck wasn’t quite where he left it.

    Nowadays I’m a much more settled sort of fellow, and a phrase like “hold my beer and watch this” will only pass my lips in jest.  Then again, there’s the time I crossed a flooded Arizona creek in the middle of the night in my old Bronco by hitting the stream at about sixty miles per hour and skipping the truck like a rock across the water…

    …but that’s a story for another time.

  • Profiles in Toxic Masculinity VI: Roy Benavidez

    The young Raul Perez Benavidez.

    Profiles in Toxic Masculinity, Part 6

    Appearances Can Be Deceiving

    The young fellow to the right looks like nothing more than a young man from some time ago, a rash, devil-may-care young guy of a sort we’ve all encountered.  Probably a good kid to share a cold beer with; a young guy with little more on his mind than finding a job, buying a car, maybe finding a girl.

    What this young fellow became, though, is much more than that.  This is one of the few photos from the youth of Roy Benavidez, a great hero, a Medal of Honor awardee, and one of the Vietnam War’s most outstanding soldiers.  Say what you will about the Vietnam conflict, but any such scrap yields both villains and heroes; Roy Benavidez is absolutely one of the latter.

    His Maculate Origin

    Raul Perez “Roy” Benavidez was born on August 5th, 1935, near Cuero, Texas.  He was the son of Salvador Benavidez, a farmer, and Teresa Perez, a Yaqui Indian.  Young Roy’s life was not an easy one, as his father Salvador died when young Ro was only two; his mother remarried but also died five years later.  Benavidez lost both of his parents to a disease not often seen today:  Tuberculosis.  On the death of his mother, Benavidez and his younger brother moved to El Campo, Texas, to live with his grandfather and an aunt and uncle.

    The young Benavidez wasn’t one to shy away from work.  He did shy away from schooling, dropping out at age 15, but he was a worker; he shined shoes at the EL Campo bus station, worked on farms on the West Coast, and eventually returned to El Campo to work in a tire shop.  In 1952, he joined the Texas National Guard; in 1955, he joined the active Army as a medic.  It was this change that finally have the young man a career – and considerably more than that.

    His Adventurous Career

    PFC Benavidez.

    Not one to shy away from a challenge, the new soldier from El Campo volunteered for Airborne training and, on completing that, was assigned to the 82nd Airborne at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina.

    In 1965, Sergeant Benavidez was sent to South Vietnam.  There he was assigned, as many Special Forces types were in those days, as an adviser to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam – working with, as U.S. Forces called them, “Marvin the ARVN.”  His luck was not good; one day on a patrol, SGT Benavidez stepped on a mine.

    His injuries were severe.  Benavidez was evacuated to the Army’s Brooke Army Medical Center at Ft. Sam Houston, Texas, where doctors assured him he would never walk again, and began processing his discharge papers.  Sergeant Benavidez decided “f**k that” and decided, in typically tough Special Forces fashion, that he would not only walk again but would resume his Army career; through sheer force of will, he did so.

    Against doctor’s orders, the determined NCO would crawl out of bed after lights out each night.  Dragging himself with his elbows and chin to a wall, he would leverage himself upright, a little further each night, pushing through pain that he admitted left him in tears but was preferable to not walking.  He eventually stood, then walked.  In July 1966, he walked out of the hospital and, despite continual pain from his barely healed wounds, volunteered to return to Vietnam.  Pain from old wounds notwithstanding, Sergeant Benavidez took his career to the next level and volunteered for Special Forces training, which he completed successfully; on his assignment to the 5th Special Operations Group, he sought and was granted assignment to the elite Studies and Observations Group.  In January 1968, his long sought-after orders came through, and he was back in-country.

    Roy Benavidez has already shown himself to have great big balls of solid titanium.  But his biggest test was yet to come.  On May 2, 1968, six hours of action would present (then) Staff Sergeant Benavidez with the necessity of putting his training and courage to the test.

    His One-Man War

    Benavidez in Action.

    On the day in question, a patrol of twelve soldiers, consisting of three U.S. Special Forces advisors and nine Montagnard tribesmen, stumbled into an entire battalion of North Vietnamese infantry, numbering around a thousand men.

    The patrol called for help.  The first attempt at rescue was not successful; several helicopters returned from the first effort with wounded crewmembers and severe damage.  Another effort was quickly assembled.  Among those at the Forward Operating Base at Loc Ninh who hurried to react was Staff Sergeant Roy Benavidez, who scrambled onto a helicopter with his medic’s aid bag and a combat knife – no other weapon, not even so much as a pistol.  He did have his dedication and his adamantine courage, which would prove to be enough.

    On arrival in the middle of a firefight, SSG Benavidez soon realized that all of the Special Forces team members were either KIA or too badly wounded to move to the extraction point.  Benavidez directed the pilot of the helicopter he was in to drop him in a small clearing; he then ran 75 meters under heavy fire to the besieged team’s positions.

    During the 75-meter run, Benavidez was hit three times, in the face, the head and in the right leg.  But that wasn’t about to stop him.  He took charge of the team, directing those still capable of firing to cover the landing of the dustoff helicopter.  He threw smoke grenades to cover the withdrawal and, under intense fire, dragged half of the team members to the helicopter.  When it proved impossible to move the remaining team members, Benavidez picked up a rifle and, shouting to the helicopter’s crew to move to the remaining team members, ran alongside the bird and directed suppressive fire at the North Vietnamese troops.

    Finally, the entire team was loaded aboard the slicks.  Benavidez wasn’t done; he completed one last sweep of the area, retrieving classified papers from the dead team leader’s body even as the enemy fire intensified.  At one point a North Vietnamese soldier rushed him, striking Benavidez with his bayonet; Benavidez killed the NV with his combat knife and continued the mission.

    Finally, suffering from thirty-seven wounds and severe blood loss, Staff Sergeant Benavidez allowed himself to be dragged into the last helicopter, finally allowing the extraction team to un-ass the area, still under heavy fire.  Sergeant Benavidez’s wounds included seven “major” gunshot wounds, twenty-eight fragment wounds, and slashes to both arms from the bayonet attack.  The fragment wounds were in his head, scalp, shoulder, buttocks, feel and legs; his right lung was collapsed, he had been struck in the back of the head with a rifle butt and a 7.62 round had hit him in the back and exited just under his heart.  His actions on that day were credited with saving the lives of eight members of the twelve-man Special Forces team.

    Back at Loc Ninh, a doctor, believing Benavidez dead, ordered him placed in a pile of body-bagged corpses, until Benavidez mustered the strength to spit in the doctor’s face.  Since dead men don’t spit, Sergeant Benavidez was once again evacuated to the States, where he spent a year recovering from his wounds.

    During his recovery, General William Westmoreland visited Sergeant Benavidez, presenting him with the Distinguished Service Cross.  The commander of the 5th, Special Forces, LTC Ralph Drake, had put Benavidez in for the Medal of Honor, but one of the requirements for that award is an eyewitness; all the eyewitnesses for many of Sergeant Benavidez’s heroism were dead.

    Years later, however, an eyewitness surfaced.  One Brian O’Connor, who had been a radioman on the Special Forces team, had been evacuated to the States and since moved to Fiji.  Benavidez had thought O’Connor killed in action, but after reading an account of Benavidez, O’Connor wrote a ten-page account of the events of May 2nd, 1968.

    Finally, on February 24th, 1981, Master Sergeant Roy Benavidez was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, placed on him by President Ronald Reagan, who commented that “…if the story of his heroism was a move script, you would not believe it.”  You can read the full citation here.

    His Golden Years

    Roy Benavidez retired from the Army in 1976 and returned home to El Campo.  He spent his retirement wisely, traveling the country speaking to young people about the importance of staying in school and completing their education.  He was in wide demand as a speaker, but favored military audiences, where the example of his Medal of Honor was particularly inspiring; meeting an NCO whom generals salute first isn’t something that happens every day.

    Master Sergeant Benavidez, as I remember him.

    Side note:  This profile has some additional meaning to me, as I had the distinct honor of shaking Roy Benavidez’s hand once.  When I was attending Advance Individual Training at the old 91A school at Ft. Sam Houston, Texas, Master Sergeant (Retired) Benavidez had come to the post to speak to some of the classes.  He later toured the training area where my company was doing some hands-on training.  He spoke to every soldier and shook a lot of hands.  We had heard he would be on post, who he was and what he had done, so we were pretty excited; I remember shaking his hand, he looked at me very seriously and said, “Keep it up, we need medics.”

    It was a considerable thrill and a hell of an honor.  Men like MSG Benavidez don’t come around every day.

    Master Sergeant (Retired) Raul Perez Benavidez died on November 29, 1998, at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, and was buried with (well-deserved) full military honors at the Ft. Sam Houston National Cemetery.  I had just left my third stint on active duty in the Army not quite two years earlier and was saddened to learn of MSG Benavidez’s passing at the untimely age of 63.  The Army, like any other large institution, has many examples that young people can learn from, both good and bad; Roy Benavidez was certainly a good one.

  • Profiles in Toxic Masculinity V: Roy Chapman Andrews

    Profiles in Toxic Masculinity, Part 5

    Appearances Can Be Deceiving

    The fellow to the right looks like a banker, stockbroker, maybe a corporate executive of some type, doesn’t he?  A solid, stable, reliable, boring guy, one you’d never find pulling off anything dangerous or exciting.

    What he was, in fact, was something completely different.  This character is Roy Chapman Andrews, one of the most groundbreaking scientists of the early 20th century, a pioneer in dinosaur paleontology, possibly one of the inspirations for the character of Indiana Jones, and a considerable badass in several different ways.

    His Maculate Origin

    Roy Chapman Andrews was born to Charles and Cora Chapman Andrews in 1884 in an unassuming house on an unassuming street in the unassuming town of Beloit, Wisconsin.  He spent a good part of his youth wandering the hills and fields around Beloit, becoming a crack shot, a careful amateur naturalist and a taxidermist.  It was his skill at that latter avocation that leveraged him into Beloit College and in part paid for that education.

    He graduated that institution in the year of 1906, with a degree in English and classes in archaeology and evolution added to the mix.  He was determined to move into the larger world.  And so, on leaving Beloit College, the young Andrews made his way to New York City, where he determined that he would enter employment at The American Museum of Natural History.  To that end he arranged to speak to the Museum’s Director, one Dr. Bumpus, who in the course of the interview dashed the young Andrews’ hopes – almost, as Andrews himself describes in his autobiography Under A Lucky Star – A Lifetime of Adventure:

    At last he said, regretfully, that there wasn’t a position of any kind open in the Museum. My heart dropped into my shoes. Finally I blurted out, “I’m not asking for a position. I just want to work here. You have to have someone to clean the floors. Couldn’t I do that?” “But,” he said, “a man with a college education doesn’t want to clean floors!” “No,” I said, “not just any floors. But the Museum floors are different. I’ll clean them and love it, if you’ll let me.” [i]

    He did indeed end up starting his career mopping floors.  But young Andrews was destined for greater things, as his subsequent career proved beyond anyone’s capacity to doubt.

    His One-Man War Adventures

    For a man who is best remembered today for his adventures in various deserts pursuing dinosaur bones, it is surprising to some that Andrews first earned his adventuring stripes chasing snakes, lizards and whales.

    Scarcely had he entered his employment at the American Museum of Natural History than the young Andrews found himself packed off aboard the USS Albatross to the East Indies, where he collected various reptile specimens and watched marine mammals at play.  This led to an interest in whales, and soon Andrews was in British Columbia at a whaling station, where he went to sea on the schooner Adventuress to try to obtain a bowhead whale skeleton for the Museum.  In this Andrews was uncharacteristically unsuccessful, but he did obtain some sterling film footage of seals, the best that had ever been available to the American public at that point.

    But careering around the ocean in whaling vessels quickly grew boring for Andrews; something more exotic was in order.  In 1914 he had married Yvette Borup, and in 1916, with his new wife along for the adventure, Andrews led an expedition across China’s southern and western provinces, cataloging the flora and fauna of that area.

    It was in 1920, however, that the plans Andrews’ most well-known adventures began to take shape.

    Bear in mind that the automobile was still kind of a brand-new thing in the early 1920s.  But Andrews wasn’t afraid of breaking new ground in more than just looking for fossils, so her determined to take a fleet of Dodge automobiles west out of Peking and into the Mongolian deserts, there to seek fossils.  The automobiles and personnel were assembled, and in 1921 the group set out.

    Mongolia in those days wasn’t the most stable of places; armed bandits were everywhere, and so were corrupt provincial police, little better than bandits themselves.  But the fossil pickings were rich.  Andrews’ expedition uncovered fossils of indricotheres, a giant hornless rhino four times as heavy as an elephant, and the rhino-sized hoofed carnivore that was named after him, Andrewsarchus. 

    Human fossils were also a goal, as Andrews adhered to the then-popular “Out of Asia” theory of human origins, which posited that mankind’s ancient ancestors arose in Asia, but while fossils of the creature now known as Homo erectus were found in China in 1923 (then described as Pithecanthropus or “Peking Man”) Andrews’ group was not destined to find any early human remains.  In fact, in 1924, anthropologist Raymond Dart found the first fossil of an australopithecine in South Africa, the “Taung child” later classified as Australopithecus africanus.  It is not known whether this discover dissuaded Andrews from the “Out of Asia” theory.

    Andrews in Mongolia, on his horse Kublai Khan.

    Andrews’ adventures in Mongolia were not entirely peaceable.  On one occasion he and a partner were driving down a desert valley when they were ambushed by bandits.  The bandits fired several shots at Andrews’ automobile, but as befitting a man with a big brass pair, the heroic explorer from Beloit just wasn’t having any of it.  As Andrews himself described it, he and his partner drove into a canyon, grabbed rifles and set up to ambush their ambushers:

    Soon our potential murderers started to climb down the cliff, evidently bent on finishing off what they had begun. But we weren’t having any. Charlie picked one fellow silhouetted against the sky. I lined my sights on another in front. Bang, bang went our rifles. Charlie’s client sat down suddenly and rolled over. Mine did a magnificent swan dive right off the cliff. The other three ducked back among the rocks. It must have been a bit of a surprise to them. [ii]

    Apparently, Andrews was a fan of Savage rifles.  From the horseback photo here, it appears Andrews favored the 99 Savage lever guns, which gives me another reason to add one to my collection.  In another photo he appears with what looks like a Model 20 Savage lying on a rock nearby.  I have not yet found a photo that clearly shows the revolver he routinely carried, although he describes it as a .38.  That covers a lot of ground, six-gun wise.

    It was on July 23rd, 1923, that Andrews and his team made the discovery that he is best remembered for today.  On that fateful day, one of the party uncovered several oval objects in Cretaceous strata and went back to camp joking about having found dinosaur eggs.  Andrews returned to the site and determined that yes, these were indeed fossilized dinosaur eggs – the first ever found.  Initially thought to be from the common Cretaceous ceratopsian Protoceratops, the eggs were many years later found to belong to a species of oviraptor.  But dinosaur eggs they were, the very first; Andrews wrote about that day:

    Dino Eggs!

    Then our indifference suddenly evaporated. It was certain they really were eggs. Three of them were exposed and evidently had broken out of the sandstone ledge beside which they lay. Other shell fragments were partially embedded in the rock and just under the shelf we could see the ends of two more eggs. [iii]

    In 1927, the first rounds of the Chinese Civil War began, wherein the Kuomintang-led government was battling for control of the country against Chinese communists.  We all know now how that turned out, but at the time it was beginning to be very dicey indeed for a band of American dinosaur hunters.  After some wrangling with bureaucrats and much difficulty in getting specimens released for export – and after one incident wherein Andrews and colleagues fled down a gravel road in their automobile with machine-gun bullets cracking past their ears, escaping only after a Chinese officer directed them to drive down the ditch to escape the worst of the fire.  After this even Andrews had had enough.  He described the aftermath of their narrow escape thusly:

    It was a difficult job to navigate over the plowed ground, but somehow we got to the gate of Peking and into the city. The experience affected each of us differently. I had been so busy driving that there was no time to be scared; or at least not to give in to the feeling. I had got the other fellows into the jam and had to get them out. But once back in Peking I felt awfully weak and sick. One of the other men who was staying with me had been perfectly cool throughout the entire performance and afterward. At two o’clock the next morning he went into violent hysterics. I had a beautiful time getting him back to normal.  [iv]

    His Golden Years

    Andrews, with his habitual holstered revolver.

    Andrews returned to the United States in 1930.  In 1934, he ascended to the Director’s chair in the Museum of Natural History, where he had begun his employment mopping floors.  He had chronicled many of his adventures prior to this, but on his retirement to California (which was not nearly as nutty a place then as it is today) in 1942, he began writing in earnest, churning out memoirs and tales of adventure which were all the more gripping because he really lived them.  His published works include:

    • Monographs of the Pacific Cetacea (1914–16)
    • Whale Hunting With Gun and Camera (1916)
    • Camps and Trails in China (1918)
    • Across Mongolian Plains (1921)
    • On The Trail of Ancient Man (1926)
    • Ends of the Earth (1929)
    • The New Conquest of Central Asia (1932)
    • This Business of Exploring (1935)
    • Exploring with Andrews (1938)
    • This Amazing Planet (1939)
    • Under a Lucky Star (1943)
    • Meet your Ancestors, A Biography of Primitive Man (1945)
    • An Explorer Comes Home (1947)
    • My Favorite Stories of the Great Outdoors Editor (1950)
    • Quest in the Desert (1950)
    • Heart of Asia: True Tales of the Far East (1951)
    • Nature’s Way: How Nature Takes Care of Her Own (1951)
    • All About Dinosaurs (1953)
    • All About Whales (1954)
    • Beyond Adventure: The Lives of Three Explorers (1954)
    • Quest of the Snow Leopard (1955)
    • All About Strange Beasts of the Past (1956)
    • In the Days of the Dinosaurs (1959)

    If time allows you to read only one, make it his Under A Lucky Star. 

    Roy Chapman Andrews passed away on March 11, 1960 and was buried in his hometown of Beloit, Wisconsin.  He left behind him a legacy of adventure that few could match.  Today’s batch of scientists seem poor stuff by comparison to the gun-toting, hellraising, fearless Roy Chapman Andrews.

    [i] Andrews, Roy Chapman. Under a Lucky Star – A Lifetime of Adventure. Read Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

    [ii] ibid

    [iii] ibid

    [iv] ibid

  • Gold Standards II – The Colt/Browning 1911

    1911 Patent Drawing

    The Greatest 20th Century Martial Sidearm

    Resolved:  The Colt/Browning 1911 pistol is the standard by which all autoloading pistols must be judged.  Now that that’s established, I’ll proceed to tell you about this magnificent sidearm and how it came to be the gold standard of autoloading handguns.

    John Browning

    It should come as no surprise that the DaVinci of firearms was involved in the genesis of the 1911.  Browning’s reputation as a gun designer was well established long before he started in on autoloading pistols, having produced such outstanding pieces as the 1894 Winchester (a gold standard in its own right) and the first commercially successful, mass-produced pump shotgun, the 1897 Winchester.

    He started in on autoloading pistols with the tiny FN Browning M1900 in .32ACP, a pipsqueak of a little blowback pistol.  But in that same year, he also designed the short-recoil operated Colt Model 1900 in .38ACP, and it was that pistol that would become the grandfather of a great line of martial pistols.

    The Precursors

    The Colt 1900

    After two years the Colt 1900 and its .38ACP cartridge were modified and improved somewhat, splitting into three designs:  The 1902 Sporting Model, the 1902 Military Model and the 1903 Pocket Hammer Model.  All three were chambered for the .38ACP, but in 1905 a final model in this line appeared, the Model 1905 with a 4 7/8” barrel chambered for a short, rimless .45 caliber cartridge that would become the immortal .45ACP.

    In 1899 the U.S. War Department had been seeking an autoloading pistol design to replace the anemic M1892 revolver and its .38 Colt cartridge.  Tested were the Luger in 7.65mm, the C96 Mauser, the Mannlicher M1894 and the Colt M1900.  This early Colt has some issues with trigger linkages that adversely affected reliability in the aptly named “torture tests” of the day, and so the War Department purchased 1,000 DWM Lugers as an experiment.

    This experiment didn’t last.  The U.S. Army, Navy and Marine Corps had learned some important lessons in the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War that convinced the War Department to once more pursue a major-caliber autoloader.

    During that latter conflict, the troops facing stoned Moro warriors encased in rawhide armor found the .38 Colt revolvers lacked stopping power, but when the Army imported some M1873 Colt single-actions in the grand old .45 Colt, things changed; a tribesman with a couple of .45 Colt in his chest generally lost all interest in matters martial then and there.

    The War Department quickly sourced a stopgap, buying a lot of the big, rugged Colt New Service double-action revolvers in .45 Colt and deeming them the M1909 revolver; meanwhile the testing of autoloaders went on.  By this time the mind of Browning had fixed the shortcomings of the M1900 series pistols and had produced something vastly better.

    The 1911.

    The 1911

    The first round of service testing reduced the field of alternatives to three:  The Savage, the DWM Luger, and the new Browning/Colt M1911.  In one of the final tests, both Colt and Savage pistols were fired six thousand times over the course of two days.  When the guns grew too hot to hold, they were dunked in a bucket of water to cool them, and the firing went on.

    The Savage had 37 malfunctions over the course of the test; the Colt, none.  In short order the War Department had adopted their first primary issue autoloading handgun, the Colt M1911.

    The original 1911 had some ergonomic flaws.  The sights were somewhat rudimentary, at least by today’s standards (although better than the near-non-existent rear sight of the issue Luger.)  The hammer spur was long and low enough that it frequently dug into the web of the firing hand, especially if the shooter (like me) had big hands.  The thumb safety was small and easy to miss, and the trigger was too long for a shooter (unlike me) with short fingers.

    After the new pistol received its baptism of fire in the Great War, Colt made some changes based on the experiences of service members who used the pistol in the field.

    New and Improved! The 1911A1.

    The 1911A1

    In 1924, Colt engineers brought out a revision of the War Department’s .45.  The 1911A1 had improved sights, a shorter trigger and a lengthened grip safety spur to address that nasty hammer bite.  The Great War had revealed that the 1911 tended to shoot low in rapid-fire instinctive shooting, so the 1911A1 had an arched mainspring housing to address this tendency by making the muzzle hold naturally a tad higher.

    In this form the 1911A1 served until 1984 as the primary service sidearm for all branches of the U.S. military, a 73-year run, unprecedented in U.S. military history.  The Colt 1911 proved its mettle in battlefields all over the world.  The old slab-sides wasn’t as pretty as a Luger or as finely fitted as the Sig P-210 but it had three great qualifications for a martial pistol:  It was rugged, reliable and tough.  I’ve never handled or fired a Savage Model 1907, but I own a Luger, not a DWM as tested by the War Department but rather a 1938 piece made at the Mauser-Werke in Oberndorf.  The Luger is a beauty and one of the most naturally pointing pistols I’ve ever handled, but it’s fussy about dirt, finicky about ammo and, with its original, serial-numbered magazine, jams at least once in every mag full of ammo.  I love the Luger for its style, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be the miserable Nazi bastard whose life depended on the damn thing; if keeping my hide unperforated was in question, I’d take a homely old 1911 over the Luger any day of the week.

    Dad with his 1911, in 1945.

    I confess a nostalgic fondness for the M1911A1.  When I was a young fellow just out of my initial entry training, I was assigned to an Infantry battalion as a Company Aidman; as part of my field gear I was issued an old leather holster with “US” stamped on the flap and, to fill it, an M1911A1 pistol of a vintage that meant my father could very easily have carried the same sidearm in 1944-46 during his tenure in Uncle Sam’s colors.  A year later I was on the battalion bullseye pistol team when we won the Division pistol championship.

    My old 1911A1 was somewhat the worse for wear, but man did that thing shoot and shoot and shoot.

    The Commercial Models

    This is where the gold standard status of the 1911 design really shows.

    Colt sold the 1911 as the Government Model, chambering it not only in the .45 ACP but also in the .38 Super and 9mm Parabellum.  But after World War 2, the company began branching out.

    In 1949, Colt brought out the Colt Commander, which may have been the first major-caliber dedicated CCW piece.  The first Commander had an aluminum frame, a shorter slide and a 4 ¼” barrel.  In 1970, Colt added the “Combat Commander” with the same barrel/slide and a steel frame, at which time the original was renamed the “Lightweight Commander.”

    In 1970 Colt introduced the Series 70 in all Government Model variations, with a collet barrel bushing and some other internal improvements; this is probably the best 1911 Colt ever made.  Ten years later the Series 80 was produced, which added an internal firing-pin safety – this on a gun that already had two mechanical safeties, three if you count the external hammer.  Also added as a half-cock notch on the hammer.  The Series 80 was somewhat underwhelming to hardcore shooters, as the added gunk on the lockwork reduced the original design’s rugged simplicity.

    Both versions were also available in the Gold Cup match pistol trim.  If you want to do some serious bullseye shooting, you won’t find anything much better suited than a Series 70 Gold Cup.

    Beginning in the late Seventies, Colt found they had some competition.  Such upstarts as Springfield Armory, Federal Ordinance and Detonics began making fine pistols on the 1911 pattern.  In 1985, a company called Para-Ordnance introduced the first 1911 featuring a double-stack, 14-round magazine – and things just got more and more complicated after that.

    In today’s market for autoloading sidearms, the 1911 pattern still, after a hundred and eight years, still dominates.

    Today

    At present I own one 1911 myself, a simple mil-spec replica of the 1911A1 with Series 70 Colt lockwork, made by Armscor in the Philippines and imported by Rock Island Armory.  This was admittedly a nostalgia purchase, as I also bought a replica US flap holster to carry it, but that affordable (about $400) 1911A1 copy is much like the original; rugged and powerful.  I had a few feeding problems until I switched to Kimber magazines, and now it will feed empty cases and reliable shoots any ammo I care to feed it.  Rock Island Armory imports fancier versions of the same gun, and I am told that they are solid and reliable in whatever livery you choose to try.

    It would be more difficult today to name the gun companies that don’t make a 1911.  Smith & Wesson gave in to the inevitable some years ago and began building their own version of a 1911; ditto for Ruger.  Remington began building 1911s some years back.  Loyal sidekick Rat has one, a Remington 1911 R1 Carry, and it’s a fine shooter, although the trigger is a bit heavier than I’d prefer.

    My old buddy Dave has a Les Baer longslide, a 6” barreled, dedicated 1911 target gun; it’s so damn well made that you’d have to work at it to not shoot it well.

    Kimber, Springfield Armory, Randall, Olympic Arms, Sig-Sauer, Taurus, Dan Wesson, High Standard, and many more – all have bowed to the demands of the market and began making 1911-pattern pistols.  Forget about a gun designer wondering how his autoloader will measure up to the 1911; most of them now are just building 1911s and having done with it.

    The Colt/Browning 1911 is a rare kind of design from a rare kind of designer; simple, tough, solid.  In its original form it is reliable as the morning sunrise; with its original .45ACP cartridge it packs enough wallop to finish most tasks with authority.  The 1911 is as near an immortal pistol design as you’re likely to find and will probably last throughout this 21st century – making it, as resolved, the gold standard of autoloading sidearms.

  • Allamakee County Chronicles VII: Fish Hooks

    Note:  A preview from my upcoming autobiography, Life’s Too Short to Smoke Cheap Cigars (Or to Drink Cheap Whiskey.)

    In the Beginning…

    Young boys and fishing seem to go together like peanut butter and jelly.  The problem is that fishing also goes along with fishhooks, like bologna and cheese.  Worse still, fishhooks and perforated skin also seem to go together, like bulls and china shops.

    My twelfth summer was the first in which I spent a lot of time out on the trout streams by myself, or with companions nearer my own age; always before that I had the benefit of a wise and beneficent father, who kept me from getting tangled up too badly in barbed, pointy objects of recurved steel.  This summer, however, my main fishing companion became the thirteen-year old local miscreant and walking disaster, a fellow named Jon.  Jon had recently attained the magic age of thirteen, and now possessed the assured wisdom of being, officially, a Teenager.  His wisdom did not extend to extracting fishhooks, or even to preventing fishhooks from being emplaced in his (or my) anatomy.

    Problem was that Jon was a bit clumsy; turning thirteen had come hand in hand with a growth spurt of vast proportions.  Seemingly overnight he shot from four feet eleven to five feet ten, with hands and feet expanding to the size of canoe paddles.  This was a recipe for awkwardness unlike anything we’d seen before.

    Bad Snags

    A bright June morning found us making a three-mile hike through the hills to a favored spot on Bear Creek a mile short of the Upper Iowa River; smallmouth bass found their way up the large, slow creek from time to time, and fat trout lounged in the deep pools.  Several of the large pools were favored fishing spots; we set up on the bank of one large, deep, still stretch, across from a limestone cliff face alive with chittering cliff swallows.  Trout were rising in the early sunshine, and all was well with our world.

    “I know just what to use,” Jon assured me, tying a #2 spinner to his line.  This spinner had a triple hook on the tail and another right behind the spinner blade; Jon promptly got one hook in his thumb, and another in his index finger.

    “Ow!  Hey, help me out here!”

    Jon wasn’t the sort to suffer in silence.  A series of yelps, barks and shouts accompanied my efforts to extract the spinner from Jon’s flesh.  As the positioning of the hook made it necessary to lean over Jon’s hand, all of the various epithets were directed into my left ear at the range of about twelve inches.  What’s worse, Jon had a set of lungs that enabled people to hear him a good mile downwind; I was subjected to the approximate noise level of a jet airliner on takeoff.

    “HEY!”

    “OOOOWWW!!!”

    “WATCH THAT!”

    “WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?!?”

    “AAAYYOOOOOOO!!!”

    When I finally started to actually try to get the hooks out, things got worse.

    A typical fish hook.

    The yelping, barking and shouting was heard at incredible distances.  The caretaker at the Girl Scout camp about a mile off later reported hearing horrible sounds, as though someone was skinning a pack of wildcats, live.  Old Amos Shepherd was tending a sick heifer when the caterwauling reached his farm three-quarters of a mile upstream.  His dairy herd of Jerseys stampeded, no doubt thinking a pack of freshly skinned wildcats was closing in; the only way Amos saw to avoid being trampled was to grab a passing cow’s tail and hang on for dear life.  Unfortunately for Amos, the Jerseys’ could run much faster than his 72-year old frame was equipped to keep up with; this resulted in his being practically airborne for the duration of the stampede.  Folks living on the lower Bear Creek road were treated to the sight of a herd of Jerseys charging flat-out down the road, with a skinny old man joining in on the stampede, clinging on to one cow’s tail for dear life and running in incredible ten and twelve foot bounds.

    After about fifteen seconds, during which we were unknowingly surrounded by panic and chaos, I finally worked the hooks loose and handed Jon back his spinner.

    “Try to be a little more careful!”  I admonished him.  Jon rubbed his bleeding hand, wincing.  “Don’t worry, I’ll get it” he assured me.

    To his credit, Jon managed to get this spinner tied on without further incident.  Stepping to the bank overlooking the pool, he let out a little line, drew his old spinning rod back, flicked it forward with a practiced flip of the wrist – and sunk the hook in the back of his head.

    “AAAYYOWWP!”

    Jon wasn’t the only kid to have difficulties wish needle-sharp fishhooks.  We all faced the necessity of extracting a barb from one portion of our anatomies or another, sooner or later.  And the worst of all fishhook injuries were, of course, not self-inflicted.  No, for when you feel the hook sink into your own flesh, you can stop its progress; when someone else sinks it into your cringing soft tissue, you have no control over their mistaken belief that they’ve just tied into a four-pound trout.

    And that brings me to Wimpy Neidert.

    There’s Always A Townie.

    Every school seems to have a kid like Wimpy.  Our version was, at twelve years of age, roughly five foot three, and just about as wide as he was tall.  Topping the roly-poly frame was a pudgy, freckled, amiable face with Coke-bottle glasses, topped by a tangle of blistering red hair.  Wimpy wasn’t often found along on our outdoor excursions; couches and television were more his forte, usually accompanied by a large bag of cheese puffs and a dozen or so cans of pop.  In fact, Wimpy had difficulty walking farther than the distance from his parent’s house in town to the bus stop; he arrived at the stop red-faced and wheezing.

    In other words, Wimpy wasn’t material for the Presidential Physical Fitness Program.  Needless to say, Jon and I were a bit surprised to find Wimpy accompanying us on our annual trip to the Upper Iowa River for the early summer sucker run.  Wimpy would have preferred to stay home, in fact, and eat cheese puffs while watching television; but a trick of history intervened.

    Wimpy’s father and Jon’s dad were best friends.  They had gone to school together, joined the Army together, went to Vietnam together, and were to that day frequently seen together imbibing cold beers in various local watering holes.  Wimpy’s father wasn’t pleased with his son’s rotund frame and slothful outlook; as we discovered later to our chagrin, Jon’s Dad volunteered our services to take Wimpy out fishing, “to get him out in the fresh air.”  Both Dads agreed it would do Wimpy good to tag along with us; we weren’t so sure.  The sucker run was beginning, though; we had a nighttime outing planned to go snag suckers; it was too late to back out now.

    And so it came to pass that late one Friday evening Jon and I were pushing our old bikes along the lower Bear Creek road towards the Upper Iowa, ambling along in the growing darkness as Wimpy puffed along behind us, astride his ancient coaster bike, accompanied by a host of groaning, creaking and squeaking sounds.  Wimpy’s bike was making some noise as well.

    It was close to ten o’clock by the time we arrived at the river.  Jon and I were disgusted at the delay, but we waited patiently as Wimpy, gasping, parked his bike, arranged his fishing gear, and finally followed us down a fifty-yard trail, over a wooden style spanning a barbed-wire fence, and across a cow pasture to the river.

    The surface of the river was as smooth as glass in the moonlight, the mirror-like surface broken here and there with the ripples caused by large white suckers cruising just below the surface.

    The sucker run was an annual tradition.  Every year, in spring and early summer, white suckers ascended smaller streams from the Mississippi to spawn.  Living in the rich, silty Mississippi enabled some of the suckers to grow to prodigious size; ten-pounders were routine, twenty-pounders not unheard of.  Since the single-minded fish didn’t feed much while spawning, we pursued them with snagging gear, heavy bait-casting rods with twenty-pound line, tipped with huge treble hooks cast inside lead weights.  The trick was to cast past the ripples in the river, and bring in the hook in jerks, bouncing it along the bottom, hopefully to snag in the sides of a large sucker.

    This, of course, was a recipe for disaster with Wimpy along.

    We split up there on the bank of the river.  Wimpy, still red-faced and wheezy, stayed put; I went upstream a hundred yards or so, and Jon opted to try his chances downstream an equal distance.  Silently, in the darkness, we made our way to our fishing spots.

    The night was cool, the stars twinkled overhead in the velvet-black sky, from the hill above the river a hoot owl called once, twice, and then dropped down the hillside to whisshhh by ten feet over my head.  Magical evening.  I cast and yanked, cast and yanked, and on my third try hooked into a reasonable sucker; in a few moments I had the six-pound fish flopping on the bank.

    An actual portion of the actual river.

    Downstream, Jon was having less luck.  Repeated efforts yielded not one fish; at his chosen spot the water was a bit deeper, and the bottom-hugging fish left no revealing ripples on the surface.  Not one to be defeated by a primordial fish with the brain the size of a chick-pea, Jon redoubled his efforts, yanking the hook vigorously along the bottom.  A small crowd of cows started to gather behind him on the bank, their curiosity piqued by the spectacle.

    In between, unknown to either Jon or me, Wimpy was finally beginning to enjoy the evening.  His tackle box contained no fishing gear.   Wimpy settled himself on the steep dirt bank, feet dangling over the water, and extracted from his box a bag of cheese puffs, a bottle of pop, a flashlight, and the latest Captain America.  He had just settled in for a nice read when the bank gave way, landing him with a loud splash in the river.

    Upstream, I heard the splash, and thought little of it.  Cattle were grazing up and downstream from us; loud splashes are not uncommon when cattle are near water.  Downstream, Jon heard the splash, thought, “beaver,” and noted the location in order to return with a few traps the coming fall.  Wimpy landed in about three feet of water and came up spluttering.  Then, with a panicked start, he noticed his cheese puffs bag floating away downstream on the current.  Grunting his annoyance, Wimpy splashed away in pursuit.

    As it would happen, Jon chose that moment to try another spot, a few yards upstream at the top of a steep bank where the river undercut the shore.  The cows followed; cows rarely get any sort of entertainment, and so are easily amused, even at the sight of a boy trying to snag a sucker.

    They were about to get the show of their lives.

    Jon, on the high bank, couldn’t see the river well in the darkness.  He hadn’t been able to see any telltale ripples before anyway, so nothing lost; he began anew his routine of casting and yanking, casting and yanking.  A splashing sound intruded on his senses; he wrote it off as a cow.  He wasn’t far off in that assessment.

    Wimpy had pursued his cheese puffs bag downstream, finally catching up to it in a swirl of water where the river undercut a high bank.  Reaching out a pudgy hand, he snagged the fugitive snack.  An odd sensation then; something slowly slid up his left leg, feeling oddly like…  like…  twenty-pound fish line.

    On the bank, Jon was bringing in his triple hook again, rod tip bouncing up and down in vigorous, slightly annoyed jerks.

    Wimpy felt the line riding up higher, now past the knee.  The full implications hadn’t sunk in yet; he froze in indecision.

    Jon felt a slight resistance on his line.  He lowered the rod tip, gave a slight yank, felt the resistance again.

    Wimpy felt the line now past the thigh; he still hadn’t quite figured out what was going on.  He was about to find out.

    Jon grinned to himself in the darkness; visions of ten-pound suckers filled his head.  He lowered the rod tip, took in a little slack with the reel, braced his thumb tight against the spool, and gave,

    one …

    mighty…

    YANK!

    This is what they feel like when they are embedded in your anatomy.

    The huge, lead-weighted triple hook leaped clear of the bottom of the river, gaining speed, propelled by the springy tip of Jon’s fishing rod, sped on its way by Jon’s young, strong arms, his muscles hardened by a youth spent tossing hay bales and wrestling dairy cattle.  The line sang as it ripped clear of the water; the hook, still gaining speed, rose, sped towards its unintended target, to sink itself not in a ten-pound white sucker, but directly into the crotch of Wimpy’s cut-off painter’s pants.

    Jon, feeling the hook hit something solid yet slightly yielding, leaned his weight into the rod to set the hook deep.  And set the hook he did; two prongs penetrated deep indeed, ripping through denim and cotton to find the most sensitive portion of Wimpy’s anatomy, while the third ripped through to sink itself in the bottom end of Wimpy’s zipper, and to anchor itself there as though set in concrete.

    No breaching whale ever rose from the water more impressively than Wimpy broaching from the Upper Iowa that night, propelled by the agony of the two needle-sharp prongs impaling the Neidert family legacy.  On the bank above, Jon recoiled in horror, faced with what was either a red-haired, screeching whale broaching unaccountably from the shallow river, or a red-tipped missile fired from an unseen enemy submarine somehow concealed in the river.  Jon engaged reverse gear and hit the gas; he proceeded exactly three feet before colliding with a curious Holstein.

    The cow reacted as cows do, butting Jon in the small of the back with some force, sending him stumbling forward, over the bank, into the river; he went down the bank as Wimpy went up.  Somehow, he had the presence of mind to hang onto his fishing rod.  He landed in the river with a loud splash and surfaced just in time to be yanked back up the dirt bank face-first.

    Wimpy had cleared the high bank in one phenomenal surge, and set off across the pasture, wailing in agony, trying to flee the impaling points.  Before Jon could react, the line went taut, yanking him over the bank and dragging him through a thin line of trees into the open pasture.

    Upstream, I heard the initial scream, followed by a series of splashes; I reeled my hook in and made for the open pasture myself.  There I was greeted by an incredible sight.

    Wimpy was charging across the pasture, screeching like a banshee; about twenty feet behind him was Jon, skidding face down through the pasture, hands clenched on his fishing rod.  Wimpy hit the fence at the end of the pasture, rebounded with an audible TWANG from the barbed wire, and reversed course.  Jon was carried along, airborne briefly in a half-loop as Wimpy set off for the opposite end of the pasture.  Fascinated, the cows clumped along behind.  I winced as I saw Jon dragged face down through a series of fresh cowpats.  I had to do something.

    “JON!”  I shouted.  “STOP HIM!”

    Summoning a terrible strength from somewhere deep within, Jon managed to flip himself over, get his feet under him, and haul back on the rod.  Wimpy fought like the lunker he was, but in the end a final yank from Jon stopped him, cringing and sobbing, in his tracks.  Wimpy dropped like a poleaxed steer.

    I approached cautiously.  Wimpy was on the ground, moaning, both hands clasped over his nether regions.  Jon was muttering words that would have earned him a clout from his mother as he knelt next to Wimpy; at first I thought he was examining Wimpy in concern for his injuries, but as I drew closer I saw that Jon was using Wimpy’s shirttail to clean cowpat off his face.

    “Think he’ll be OK?”  I asked Jon.

    “If he has any kids, they’ll be stupid.”  Jon replied.

    “Big surprise there, huh?”  I grinned at Jon.  He flicked a bit off cowpat off his ear.  The Holsteins gathered around, their eyes wide.  They hadn’t had this much fun in years.

    The journey home was less than pleasant.  In the lead, Wimpy walked, or rather waddled, with shrieks of agony at regular intervals; neither Jon nor I professed the expertise to perform the necessary extraction.  Jon followed, answering every shriek with a shouted imprecation.  I brought up the rear, a good twenty yards back, the better to avoid Jon’s rather strong barnyard odor.

    And then…

    It took a long drive to town to the local Emergency Room to finally extract the hook and thus ensure the continuity of the Neidert line, but Jon and I weren’t there to see it.  Breaking free as soon as we delivered Wimpy to his father at Jon’s house, we headed off to an upper stretch of Waterloo Creek near the Hooper farm for a bit of nice relaxing midnight trout fishing.

    There, on the moonlit creek bank, all was peaceful.  Jon looked over at me, grinned, and drew his rod back to cast.  He flicked the rod tip forward briskly, lodging his spinner’s hook firmly in his left ear.

    “OWWWW!!”  Jon yelped.  “Hey!  Help me out here!”

    I was already half-way home.

  • Allamakee County Chronicles VI: Bull!

    Note:  A preview from my upcoming autobiography, Life’s Too Short to Smoke Cheap Cigars (Or to Drink Cheap Whiskey.)

    Bull!

    Can you tell which ones are mean? Me neither.

    Most folks these days don’t think about cattle much.  Our increasingly urbanized populace knows, vaguely, that beef and dairy products come from cattle.  They may have a half-way decent mental image of what most cattle look like – big, boxy critters, basically a perambulating digestive system with beef mounted around the periphery, a head on one end and a big bag for producing milk and cheeses on the other.  There are other things that go on at the end across from the head, things which are best not discussed in polite company.  That will not, of course, prevent me from discussing them here.

    But what these urban and suburban dwellers don’t understand is the bovine species’ largely unsuspected and malicious intelligence, nor how quickly they can turn that malice into action.  But when I was a young fellow, back in Allamakee County, in the heart of northeast Iowa’s dairy country, we understood it all too well.

    As for the city-dweller’s misconceptions of the nature of cows, this is something I learned from the first good friend I ever had who hailed from a big city – something that had to wait until I joined the Army.

    Fort Dix, New Jersey – sometime in the early Eighties

    It was a hot, sweaty, humid day at Fort Dix, New Jersey – the exact wrong sort of day to be suffering through an Army Basic Training field exercise.

    Not that there is a right sort of day to be suffering through an Army Basic Training field exercise.

    At the end of a “lane” that featured lots of pyrotechnics and tear gas, we were given five minutes to rest and recover before the next bit of training.  The moment the Drill Sergeant yelled “Fall out,” I staggered to a tree and crashed to the ground under the shading branches.

    My buddy, a skinny city kid from Philadelphia, dropped down to the sandy ground beside me, groaning.  “I think I cracked a rib,” he complained.  “Damn grenade simulator went off right behind me.  Knocked me right over.  Think I hit a rock when I went down.”  He rubbed his ribs.  “Man, imagine if this was real.  I mean, real people shooting real shit at us.  Can you imagine that?  Scare the crap out of me, I tell you that.”

    “Oh, I don’t know,” I replied, with big-tough-country-kid nonchalance.  “I’ve faced stuff more frightening that bullets and grenades.”

    “The hell you say,” my buddy said.  “What’s scarier than bullets and grenades?”

    “Cows.”

    Back in Allamakee County

    Back The F*** Off.

    The Old Man had raised Black Angus cattle for many years but had mostly foregone farming by the time I was old enough to wander around much on my own.  Black Angus cattle are compact, even-tempered beasts, but are still big enough and unpredictable enough to cause problems, but all in all, Dad didn’t have too much trouble with them.

    Later, though, his timbered acreage in Allamakee County was surrounded by dairy farms, the favored breed for which in those days were Holsteins – big cattle, heavy, sometimes bad-tempered.  Most of my friends’ families were involved in the dairy business to some extent or another, and the neighbor’s cattle had the uncanny ability to break fences and would frequently wander onto our property, at which point it became my job to run them off.

    I once broached the subject of using my .30-30 to run them instead into the big freezer in the workshop but was rebuffed with a loud roar.

    Instead, I experimented with a few other means of chasing errant bovines off the Clark property.  One of my early efforts involved an old fiberglass recurve bow and blunt arrows, which I bounced off bovine rib cages and hindquarters.  This had less than positive results, either merely annoying the cattle or angering them.  After spending half an hour about twenty feet up a big box-elder tree one afternoon with four or five angry cows milling about beneath, I gave up on the archery solution.

    We finally settled on light skeet loads of #9 shot from a 12 gauge, delivered from about 20-30 yards.  The light shot warmed the cows’ hindquarters without penetrating the skin, and that usually moved the cows along – except for the odd instance that saw the Old Man or myself running around the flat ground across the creek with a few cows in pursuit.

    Holsteins were cows to watch out for.  But there was one local bovine, not a cow as such but most emphatically a bull, the very thought of whom struck terror into the hearts of all the local kids.

    A Local Legend

    This huge Holstein bull lived on one of the farms belonging to the expansive Duffy clan.  Unfortunately, the farm in question lay in a pleasant little valley through which ran the pleasant little waterway of Waterloo Creek, in which swam a pleasant little population of pleasant little trout.  The bull maintained a constant vigil of what he thought of as his personal stretch of Waterloo Creek.  His zeal in pursuing trespassers made him a constant problem for those of us with a passion for fishing; his evil disposition, vast size and uncanny deviousness made him dangerous for even his owner.  The bull was a killer, and only the board full of blue ribbons and large sums he earned his owner in stud fees had preserved him to this point.  His back was as broad as a ’69 Cadillac, his head larger than a twenty-gallon washtub topped by needle-tipped horns.  His eyes glittered red and angry, full of hate for any moving object that was not one of his cows.

    This bull was notorious enough, in fact, that all the local folk had unanimously given him a name.  He had some long, fancy pedigree name that nobody knew or cared about; instead, he was known locally as The Antichrist.

    The actual Waterloo Creek. Really.

    My first encounter with The Antichrist occurred when I was about fifteen.  I was mooching around in the Waterloo Creek valley looking over some favored fishing spots.  There was a beautiful big pool in a pasture on the back reaches of one of the Duffy farms that always held fat brown trout.

    I was just climbing over the fence when I heard a strangled bellow.  I froze in place, the top strand of barbed wire uncomfortably close to some delicate real estate and looked over to the trees along the creek.

    There stood The Antichrist, a massive, menacing presence.  He lifted a front hoof and dropped it.  He let out a snort that could as easily come from some massive, primeval monster.

    I disengaged from the fence and stole quietly away.  No amount of trout was worth chancing The Antichrist.  Several of my friends had already had close calls with him, and I had no desire to repeat their experiences.

    But the closest call we ever had with The Antichrist happened two or three years later and involved my friend Jon’s big-city cousin Albert and a time-honored country kid tradition:  A snipe hunt.

    Now most folks nowadays wouldn’t fall for this stunt.  Even the most urbane of urban dwellers have heard of this old trick, I suspect in part because of this Internet thing all the kids are doing these days.  But back in the late Seventies, the Internets weren’t even a gleam in Al Gore’s eyes yet, and precautionary information traveled more slowly.

    So, when my buddy Jon’s cousin Albert was coming to visit from Chicago, we had no trouble selling him on the exciting adventure of a nighttime snipe hunt.  Albert’s family were staying with Jon’s aunt and uncle in town, but Albert had spent quite a bit of time hanging out with us out in the boonies, and was taking rather enthusiastically to fishing, camping and woods-bumming; in other words, a typical summer.

    We set the date for our snipe hunt on a warm July weekend.  Albert’s folks dropped him off at the Hooper place that Saturday afternoon.  I was already in residence; Jon and I had been plotting for two hours before Albert showed up.  All was in readiness.

    Jon had through mysterious means obtained a large burlap sack, big enough to contain a small elephant.  I had a small, cheap plastic flashlight.  The hill we chose for the exercise contained some of the nastiest brush to be found in northeast Iowa – acres of blackberry brambles, sumac thickets, and towering oaks that blocked out the sun even on the brightest of days; the evening coming promised only the thinnest of sliver moons to light the forest.  Perfect!

    The day ended, and after supper the three of us were standing in the Hooper barnyard planning strategy.

    “OK, since you’re new, Albert,” Jon was saying, “You’ll have to stand in the brush and hold the sack.  The thing is, you can’t shoot at night, so what we’ll do is to loop around up to the top of the hill and sort of drive the snipe down to you.  You stand and hold the sack and catch the snipe as they come a-runnin’ down the hill.”

    “Won’t they fly?”  Albert wanted to know.

    “Nope.”  I assured him.  “Snipes only fly in daylight.  They’d rather run after dark, that way they don’t run into trees and such.”

    Albert looked around at the gathering gloom.

    “Are you sure?” he quavered.

    “Hey!”  Jon protested, using a phrase that foretold unspeakable horror to anyone who knew Jon and I better.  “Trust us!”

    We drove out to a quiet stretch of country road.  “Up there,” Jon indicated one particularly large, dark hillside covered with hardwood timber.  “That’s where were going.”

    We climbed out of The Van, hopped a barbed wire fence, and headed up the hill.  It was a good mile from the road that we placed Albert, holding his sack, on the edge of a blackberry thicket.

    “We’ll have to take the flashlight, Albert.”  Jon informed our victim.  “We’ll need it to see our way up to the top.”

    “Uh, ok….” Albert sounded doubtful.  There under the trees it was darker than a crow’s wing in a pile of coal on a dark night.  We left Albert holding the bag, and aided by the anemic flashlight beam, trooped on up the hill.

    Jon and I had forgotten one crucial detail about this hillside, where this evening there grazed a herd of Holstein cattle.  We had neglected to consider who owned this hill overlooking the Waterloo Creek valley.

    Once we were out of earshot of Albert’s stand, we could no longer contain our glee at his predicament.

    “Now,” Jon was telling me, “we can loop around over the top of the hill and down the other side, and then we’ll follow the road back to The Van.  We can go into town and have something to eat.  We’ll go back and get old Albert about 2AM, hawhawhawhaw!!”

    “Hawhawhawhaw!!”  I replied.  “I can’t wait to see the look on his face after four hours in those woods!!  This is gonna be great!!”

    We’d forgotten about the lynchpin of the Duffy dairy herd.

    “Hawhawhawhaw!” Jon and I laughed our way through the woods, up the hill to the meadow on the top.

    As Jon and I entered the open meadow at the top of the hill, we were still filled with mirth.  We had forgotten that his father was grazing his cattle in the high meadow.

    A deep, rolling snort echoed across the dark meadow.  We strained to see the source of the sound; even in the open it was too dark to see much of anything.

    “Haw?”  Jon querulously asked the darkness.

    Somewhere out in the darkness, The Antichrist stomped one foot.  A tremor went through the ground beneath our feet; several branches fell from the trees behind us.  Jon looked at me, his eyes wide with terror.

    He was like this, but with more horns.

    “It’s The Antichrist!”  Jon shouted at me.  “I forgot about him!”

    “What should we do?”  I shouted back.

    “RUN!!!”  Jon screeched.

    The thunder of hoofbeats was already drumming in the dark, getting louder by the second.

    To say that we ran for our lives is the grossest of understatements.  We flew down that hill.  We crashed through thickets in which a bulldozer would have helplessly bogged down.  We ran over and snapped off saplings four and five inches thick, without notice.  About one-third of the way down was a ravine; on the way up we’d been required to climb carefully down one side and scramble up the other.  On the way down, both of us leaped the 20-foot chasm without missing a stride.  Behind us was the ever-present thunder of hooves, slowly gaining on us; The Antichrist plowed a 6-foot wide swath through the trees; the farmer who owned the place in fact gained a full winter’s worth of firewood from the felled timber.

    At one point during our headlong flight, dimly in the recesses of my subconscious, I recalled that we’d left Albert on the edge of a thicket nearby.  He must have heard our headlong rush to escape a ton of pounding, snorting death; he called out to us.

    “Are there any snipe, guys?  Are the snipe coming?”  I had a sudden flashed mental image of Albert standing, holding his sack, unaware of the onrushing Death in the darkness.

    “RUN!”  I shouted at Albert.

    “What?  Why?” he shouted back.

    “BULL!” both Jon and I bellowed at once.

    Albert had been wearing new white sneakers.  As I flashed past Albert’s stand, I saw only a glimpse of two white sneakers and two huge, white eyes staring.  The hoofbeats were getting closer; I reached deep inside myself, pulled out a little bit of extra energy from some unknown place, and put on some speed.

    The pounding behind me had doubled somehow; then, suddenly, I was passed in the dark by a flying pair of white sneakers.

    It seems Albert had been a varsity sprinter on his Chicago school’s track team.  In his big-city ignorance of country ways, he didn’t realize how the ability to run like the very wind was frequently of great use in our hunting, fishing and camping adventures.  At least not until the thundering sound of The Antichrist’s charge reached his ears.  The very air crackled as Albert ran past us; a faint smell of ozone followed his flight.  Jon and I homed in on the trail of acrid odor and followed it all the way back to the road where Jon’s van was parked, where we easily cleared the 3-strand barbed wire with single, effortless arching leaps.

    The Antichrist skidded to a stop, frustrated by the barbed wire, his intent of reducing us to minor portions of the landscape deterred.  We managed to halt our flight about 50 feet from the fence; the three of us turned to see The Antichrists’ beady, hateful eyes glittering at us in the faint glow of the moonlight.  The bull casually lowered his head, scored out a foot-long sliver from a wooden fencepost with one horn, and let out one more mighty snort which blew Albert’s hat off; then he slowly turned, and ponderously made his way off into the darkness, towards his waiting cows.

    Albert bent over suddenly.  Jon grabbed for his arm, fearing he was fainting from terror.  I grabbed his other arm; Albert was shaking uncontrollably.  We both shook him, hoping to break him loose from whatever horror assailed him.

    “Ha!  Ha!  HAHAHAHAHAA!!!!  Albert was laughing!  Not just laughing but laughing uproariously!  Not a terrified, hysterical laugh, but a wild, carefree laugh, as one who’s just witnessed what was very possibly the greatest act of comedy he’d ever see in his life.

    “You guys…” he panted, when he finally regained the ability to speak, “you guys, you told me…”

    “What?”  Jon demanded.  “What did we tell you?”

    “You told me it was the most exciting hunting there was!” Albert giggled.  “I guess you sure showed me!  It was sure exciting after all, it sure was!”  Albert collapsed into the dust of the graveled road, clutching his sides.

    Over Albert’s convulsing form, Jon and I looked at each other.  We were witnesses to a Phenomenon; one we’d never expected.  Despite all his citified manners, despite his pitiful lack of knowledge of fishing, shooting, hunting, tanning hides, running a trapline, or pretty much anything useful, Albert had the one quality that would gain him acceptance faster than any.

    Albert was a good sport.

    In time, he learned the rest.

    Back at Fort Dix

    Yeah, it’s best to stay away.

    “Cows,” my old Army buddy scoffed.  “The hell you say.  Ain’t nobody afraid of cows.”

    Nearby, a kid from upstate New York suddenly popped upright.  “Cows? Where?”

    Another guy, this one from rural Wyoming, snapped out of a doze.  “Cows?  I don’t want to get mixed up with cows.  They’ll have calves this time of year.  They get mean when they have calves.”

    A third kid, this one from central Missouri, chimed in.  “Cows, oh, man, this is bad enough already without a bunch of damn cows wandering around.”

    “Come on,” my big-city buddy replied to us all.  “You’re all a bunch of big corn-fed farm boys, and you’re telling me you’re afraid of cows?”

    “Not afraid, so much,” the guy from Wyoming said.  We all knew he came from a long line of ranchers.  “Just real, real cautious.”

    I could tell my big-city buddy didn’t believe us.  Most folks these days don’t think about cattle much. But even at the thought, my head came up automatically, scanning the open woods around us, not for Soviet soldiers, armored vehicle or even drill sergeants, but for cows.

    As It Stands Today…

    I’m still cautious around cows.

    The stretches of Colorado landscape where I do my woods-bumming these days is frequently shared with cattle.  These are beef cattle, usually Herefords or the Hereford-Angus crosses known as black baldies.  These are reasonably tolerant cattle, and the fact that they spend summers on open range makes them cautious themselves and prone to staying away from people.

    Also, bulls these days are mostly kept confined; AI (no, not that AI – Artificial Insemination) has replaced the need for most ranchers and farmers to herd a bull with their cows.  But occasionally, usually in the distance, I can hear the ringing bellow of a bull.  It’s a weirdly primal sound, one that still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

    Most of the folks hereabouts, though, fish and hike unmolested by cows, and so miss out on the chance to amass tales of adventure.  They really don’t know what they’re missing.

  • Gold Standards I – The Model 12 Winchester

    The Perfect Repeater

    Resolved:  The pre-64 Model 12 Winchester is the standard by which all pump shotguns must be judged.  Now that that’s established, I’ll proceed to tell you about this magnificent shotgun and how it came to be the gold standard of pump shotguns.

    My Black Diamond Trap Gun.

    Full disclosure:  I’m not impartial.  I own three Model 12s – a 1940 12-gauge field gun, a 1941 16-gauge field gun, and a 1942 12-gauge Black Diamond trap gun.  The sequential years are nothing more than a happy coincidence.

    John Browning

    It should come as no surprise that the DaVinci of firearms was involved in the genesis of the Model 12, as he was with so many American sporting and martial arms.  But his involvement in this case is limited to a precursor of the Model 12.

    The story begins in 1887.  In that year, Winchester determined to build and sell a repeating shotgun.  They turned to John Browning, who had developed the company’s outstanding 1886 lever rifle the year before, along with the Winchester 1885 falling-block single-shot rifle.

    Browning had already produced a successful lever-action rifle for Winchester, and while he advocated a pump-action for a shotgun, Winchester’s official position at that time was that they were a lever gun company, and by God they’d have a lever-action shotgun.  Browning came through, producing the 1887 lever gun, the first mass-produced repeating shotgun by a major manufacturer.

    But the 1887 lever gun was big, clunky, and it’s drop-block lever action required a long throw.  It was offered in 10 and 12 gauge but was only strong enough for black-powder shells, at a time when higher-performance smokeless powder loads were just beginning to become available.

    Sales were lackluster.  Double guns still handled better than the heavy lever gun and offered much faster second shots and quick reloads.  Browning politely reminded Winchester of his stated position on the pump-action for shotguns.  Winchester finally agreed that the brilliant designer may have had a point.

    The Model 93/97

    John Browning Winchester Model 1893 1897 US Patent 441390

    In response, Browning designed the black-powder-only 1893 pump shotgun, which was quickly refined into the 12- and 16-gauge, smokeless-powder-capable Model 1897.  The first variant of the ’97 offered in 1897 was a solid-frame 12 gauge, followed in 1898 by the takedown version in 12-gauge and the takedown 16 gauge in 1900.

    Sales of the new gun were brisk, which probably earned Winchester’s management a “told you so” or two from John Browning.  In fact, Browning liked the new shotgun enough that he retained one as his personal shotgun, using it on ranges and in the game fields until he died in 1926.

    The 1897 had a few interesting features.  The six-shot tubular magazine remains pretty typical for pump-guns made today, but the external hammer and lack of an additional safety probably wouldn’t fare well in today’s market – although I would opine, as I have repeatedly, that a gun with an external hammer doesn’t require an additional safety.

    Another feature the 97 had was the lack of a trigger disconnect.  This device disconnects the trigger when the action is cycled, thus requiring the trigger to be released and pressed again for follow-up shots.  The 97, like most pump-guns designed in the early 20th century, was a “slam-fire” gun – one could hold the trigger down and cycle the action, firing a new round ever time the slide slammed home.  This isn’t a terribly accurate way to fire a shotgun, but I will admit if can be great fun; when I was a young fellow, I used to experiment in this technique with my Dad’s old Stevens pump, which had the same capacity.  I never learned to hit much that way but burned up a fair amount of shells until the Old Man saw me dumping magazines of cheap field loads into the dirt bank we used as a backstop and, fearing damage to his gun by the rough use, put a stop to my experimenting.

    The ’97 was in production until 1957, a sixty-year run.  During both World Wars, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps used 97s to good effect in combat, the old guns with their slam-fire ability, six-shot magazines, 18” barrels, heat shrouds and bayonet lugs making good “trench brooms” in Great War France as well as good last-ditch jungle weapons in such places as Guadalcanal and Bougainville in the Pacific during Great War Part Two.

    Today Chinese manufacturer Norinco makes a copy of the 1897 Winchester, supposedly made exactly to original specs but, based on examples I’ve examined, certainly not to original standards.  My estimation of these guns is that one might make a decent tent pole or boat anchor, but they are not stout enough to make a decent pry bar.  If you’re looking for an external-hammer pump shotgun, skip the Chinese knockoffs and find an old Winchester.

    In the grand scheme of things, however fine and successful a gun as the 97 was, was only the prequel to the Perfect Repeater.

    Winchester’s T.C. Johnson

    The Model 12, exploded.

    There are few cases in which another designer has taken one of John Browning’s designs and improved it, but in 1912, Winchester engineer Thomas Crossley (T.C.) Johnson pulled it off.

    Starting with the 1897, Johnson retained the take-down action mechanism, the six-round tubular magazine and the slam-fire capacity.  The changes were primarily to the receiver.  Johnson designed an enclosed receiver with an internal hammer, with the magazine loading from the bottom of the receiver and spent shells ejected through a port on the right side of the receiver.  The feed system was also redesigned; where the 97 had used a big, heavy lifter to not only feed new rounds into the chamber but to also lock the bolt closed, the new gun used a much lighter shell lifter and instead locked the bolt closed with a lug that locked solidly into the top of the receiver.  The receiver itself was machined from a billet of forged steel, making for a gun of immense strength for the time, perfectly capable of handling the new smokeless powder ammo.

    Thus, was born the final configuration of the pump-action shotgun, which form persists even today.

    Perhaps because the Model 97 was already being produced in 12 and 16 gauge, the Model 1912, as it was then known, was initially introduced only in 20 gauge, with 12- and 16-gauge versions being introduced in late 1913.  The 16-gauge guns were built on the 20-gauge frame, making them an ideal compromise between “thump” and handling; my own 16-gauge is light, fast, a joy to handle, but with standard 2 ¾” shells puts out an appreciably larger shot charge than a 20.

    Winchester’s marketing department were quick to promote the new pump-gun, labeling it “The Perfect Repeater,” which to my estimation is a pretty accurate description.  A variety of Model 12s were produced, including lightweight versions and “Heavy Duck” guns that fired the very first 3” 12-gauge shells.  Trap and Skeet versions were also produced, as were the fancy Pigeon Grade guns, featuring engraving, silver and/or gold inlays, and AAA+ walnut stocks and fore ends.

    Like the 97 before it, the Model 12 also went to war, in trench gun trim, serving alongside the 1897 Winchester as well as the Stevens 520A and the Ithaca 37 in both World Wars as well as Korea and Vietnam.  The government also bought standard versions for marksmanship training; those guns were fitted with big, ugly Cutts Compensators.  The Old Man, when he ran a skeet range on an Army airfield in Victorville, California in late 1945 and early 1946, ran a lot of rounds through the range’s Model 12s and the accompanying Remington 11as.

    It was in the game fields, though, that the Model 12 really shone.  The combination of the enclosed, forged and machined receiver, the take-down action and the magazine capacity made the Model 12 very popular among bird and small-game hunters.  The gun was well-made, reliable, strong enough to handle heavy loads and tough enough to withstand bad weather, rain, damp, snow, you name it.

    A 1942 Winchester shotgun ad.

    By the mid-20th century, though, the very success of the Model 12 had resulted in some competition.  One notable pump-gun of mid-century, the Stevens 520/520A, also came from the mind of John Browning, but those guns were primarily aimed at the economy market and almost all were built in private-label trim for such outlets as Sears-Roebuck and Montgomery Wards.  As such, they didn’t make many inroads into Winchester’s sales of Model 12s.

    All that changed in 1950, with the introduction of the Remington 870, and a near-immortal pump-gun in its own right.  But the 870, while also tough and reliable, was cheaper to produce and sold at a lower price than the Model 12.  The 870 was a bargain for shooters, while the Model 12, with its forged, milled receiver and considerable hand-fitting, was becoming too expensive to produce.  The introduction of more economical yet still reliable and tough pump-guns like the aluminum-framed Mossberg 500 furthered the trend; hand-fitted guns like the Model 12 were becoming too costly for most shooters.

    In 1964, during the infamous Winchester reorganization, the company’s management decided that the Model 12 cost too much to build; the grand old gun was not a good gamble for the modern market.  Production of the Model 12 ceased that year, although a few guns still made their way out of Winchester’s Custom Shop.  Mikoru in Japan made a few guns on the Model 12 specifications bearing the U.S. Repeating Arms and Browning labels, but after 1964, mass production of the original Winchester Model 12 ended.

    Today

    If you’re looking to pick up an original pre-64 Model 12 today, there are plenty available, but you should be aware of a few precautionary notes:

    1. Early guns had short chambers. In the first few years, 12-gauge guns had 2 5/8” receivers, while 16-gauge models had 2 9/16” chambers. It can be harmful to gun and shooter to fire 2 ¾” shells in these guns.
    2. In the 1920s many Model 12s were produced with nickel steel barrels. These guns are all clearly marked on the barrel, “NICKEL STEEL,” and are still very fine guns; but be advised, if the finish is badly worn, these guns don’t reblue easily.  There was a very specific process involved; back when Winchester was still Winchester, one could send nickel steel guns in for refinishing and the company would do a very fine job.  The attempts I’ve seen since then, done by third parties, have had… well, mixed results.
    3. Both the 1897 and Model 12 Winchester shotguns have notoriously thin barrel walls. This will not be an issue unless your desire to have a gun cut for choke tubes.  Most outfits simply won’t touch an old Model 12; Carlson, for example, will tell you to not even send the gun in for evaluation.  I have had two Model 12s cut for tubes by Briley, the only outfit I’m aware of that will touch this job; the tubes provided are frighteningly thin.  I bet I could crush one flat between thumb and forefinger, although I won’t try; I have fired quite a few rounds through both 12 and 16 with these tubes, however, with no issues whatsoever.

    The market in pump shotguns today is an embarrassment of riches.  But you have to wonder, every time a gun company engineer comes up with a new pump-gun design, has to ask himself, somewhere in the deep recesses of his mind, “How will this compare to the Model 12?”

    For longevity, for fit and finish, for reliability, for flawless function, and, yes, for beauty, the Model 12 Winchester remains The Perfect Repeater – the gold standard, the gun by which all other pump shotguns are measured.  I don’t see that fact changing any time soon.

  • Profiles in Toxic Masculinity IV: Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis

    Appearances Can Be Deceiving

    To the right you can see just another bronze bust of just another old dead white guy.  No big deal, right?  Museums the world over have millions of ‘em.

    This isn’t just any old dead white guy immortalized in bronze.  This is Cato the Younger or, as his contemporaries knew him, Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis, a Stoic, scion of the late Roman Republic, a famously incorruptible statesman, advocate for liberty (or at least what passed for it in those days) and the latest in our examples of Toxic Masculinity.

    His Maculate Origin

    Born in 95BC in the city of Rome, Cato quickly grew into a stubborn, willful child.  The Greek-became-Roman-citizen Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus (Plutarch) chronicled several events from the young Cato’s life, including his refusal to support the Marsi in the Social War – in spite of having been dangled out a window by his ankles, said dangle having been carried out by the leader of the Marsi, one Quintus Poppaedius Silo.  This was Cato’s first public display of ballsiness and, while it is not our place to question Plutarch’s chronicling of these events, it’s important to note that Cato would have been around four years old at this time.

    During the dictatorship of Lucius Cornelius Sulla, the dictator often sought out the then-fourteen-year-old Cato and his brother Caepio for conversation, despite Cato’s outspoken opposition to the dictator.  Cato’s tutor Sarpedon cautioned Cato about his opposition, noting that Sulla had taken a free hand in executing Roman nobles that opposed him; Cato replied by asking for a sword, after which Sarpedon somehow managed to curtail the boy’s public excursions.

    Cato had quite a few notable relations.  Among them:  His half-sister, Servilia Major, was the long-standing mistress of Julius Caesar and the mother of Marcus Junius Brutus.  At age 21 he married a woman about whom little is known but her name, Atilia; with her he had two children, his son Marcus Porcius Cato and his daughter Porcia, who would later marry the same Marcus Junius Brutus.  This connection would have significant meaning in the civil war that was to come.

    His Adventurous Career

    Not really Cato.

    On reaching majority and receiving his inheritance, Cato left the house of the uncle where he had spent his childhood.  While his inherited wealth would have allowed him a life of luxury, Plutarch tells us that the young Cato eschewed unnecessary comforts and instead dove deep into Stoic philosophy, living modestly, eating no more than necessary, drinking only (apparently a great deal of) cheap wine, wearing plain, undyed robes and even doing without shoes.  He cultivated physical endurance, exposing himself to all conditions of heat, cold and damp to better enable himself to withstand discomfort.

    Cato was 23 when the Third Punic War began in 72 BC.  (Honestly, I always thought I would have taken Spartacus’s side on that one, but still…)  He quickly volunteered to join his brother Caepio in the field.  The brothers didn’t have much impact in that war, but five years later, in 67 BC, Cato was given command of a legion in Macedon.  There he impressed his troops by sharing their food, drink and living conditions.  Cato, true to his Stoic philosophy, chose to forgo the luxuries afforded other commanders and slept among his men.  He led their marches from the front, and only left his legion when he received word of his brother, wounded and dying in Thrace.

    The death of his brother hit Cato hard.  After burying his sibling, Cato embarked on an extensive walkabout of Rome’s eastern provinces and did not return to Rome until 65 BC.

    On his return to Rome, Cato was elected quaestor, a position that put the Stoic in the position of being able to audit and, to some extent control, the state Treasury.  His strict rectitude and incorruptibility made him somewhat unpopular in this position, as he quickly moved to prosecute several nobles – including some of former dictator Sulla’s inner circle – for illegal appropriation of funds and for filing fraudulent documents.  Cato made himself plenty of enemies in this role, about which he appeared to not give even one single ounce of crap.

    In 63 BC, Cato was elected Tribune of Plebs, in which role he assisted the sitting Consul, Marcus Tullius Cicero (a good choice for another Profile in Toxic Masculinity) in squashing the Cataline Rebellion.  Once the rebellion was put down, Cato, in a display of his usual inflexibility, wanted the conspirators executed, but a Roman general named Gaius Julius Caesar insisted instead on exiling the malefactors, spreading them among several far-flung Roman settlements for “safekeeping.”

    The animosity between Cato and Caesar appears to date from this point.

    Around this time Caesar, General Gnaeus Pompey Magnus and Marcus Licinius Crassus formed a triumvirate, and began slowly consolidating power between the three of them.  Cato opposed the triumvirate at every turn.  In 61 BC, Pompey returned from a campaign in Asia and demanded both a Triumph and that the Senate postpone elections to allow him to run for Consul; Cato opposed the measure, convincing the Senate to allow Pompey only one of the two options.  Pompey chose the Consul’s chair over the Triumph, but faced with the same demand from Caesar, Cato was forced to resort to a filibuster.  Unlike today’s proceedings in our own Senate, Cato actually had to hold the floor and speak, which he did so until sunset brought an end to the proceedings.

    In time Caesar became Consul, and immediately proposed to award his veteran troops with rich farmlands in Campania.  As this province and its agriculture provided almost a fourth of the Republic’s tax revenue, Cato again took to the rostrum to oppose the measure – upon which Caesar had the Consul’s Lictors forcibly remove Cato from the Senate, an insult which Cato was not to forget.  Still not giving even one tiny little crap, Cato resolved to oppose Caesar’s ambitions at every turn.

    But the Triumvirate was on shaky ground at this point.  Caesar’s ambitions were about to bring him into conflict with his fellow triumvirs.  It turns out that Cato’s inflexibility and zeal in prosecuting Sullan nobles had brought him in conflict with a famous general, the aforementioned Gnaeus Pompey Magnus, who had been known as The Teenage Butcher for his zeal in persecuting Sulla’s enemies.  It is ironic, then, that this very general would come to be an ally of Cato’s in the coming unpleasantness.

    The solidity of Cato’s big brass pair was about to be tested.

    His One-Man War

    The Senate.

    Matters came to a head in 49 BC.  Cato was then in the Senate, a key member of a group of republican Senators known as the Optimates.  In that fateful year, Caesar was winding up his campaigns in Gaul, having defeated and taken prisoner the Celtic king/warlord Vercingetorix.  Before the Senate, Cato insisted that Caesar’s term as proconsul had ended, and with it his proconsular immunity; he demanded Caesar return to Rome as an ordinary citizen, there to face charges.

    Cato’s now-ally, Pompey, was willing to let Caesar accept continuation of his immunity along with giving up all but one of his legions and accepting governorship of one province, but Cato refused the compromise, and managed to ram through a resolution recalling Caesar.

    The conqueror of Gaul didn’t take this well.  He crossed the Rubicon with one legion and marched on Rome.  Marcus Anneus Lucanus chronicled that moment:

    Caesar crossed the flood and reached the opposite bank. From Hisparie’s Forbidden Fields he took his standards said, “Here I abandoned peace and desecrated law; fortune it is you I follow. Farewell to treaties. From now on war is our judge!”

    Caesar had indeed decided to follow Fortune, and Fortune had evidently taken him as a pet, for with one legion he drove Pompey and the Optimates out of Rome and into Greece, where at Pharsalus the outnumbered Caesar seized victory from the jaws of defeat and sent Pompey and the remnants of the Optimates fleeing.  Pompey went to Egypt, where he met execution at the hand of Ptolemey’s minions seeking to curry favor with Rome.  Cato and Quintus Metellus Scipio fled to Utica in north Africa, determined to fight to the end for the Republic.

    Utica, or what’s left of it.

    Caesar followed.

    The final battle was fought at Thapsus, where Caesar was again victorious, and against the normal custom, Caesar ordered the execution of all of Scipio’s men.  Cato was not present at the battle, having remained within Utica.  At this point even the adamant Stoic had to concede defeat.

    His Defiant Ending

    Cato, sadly, wasn’t to enjoy any happy golden years.

    Refusing a pardon from Caesar, Cato took up a sword and plunged it into his stomach.  Plutarch wrote:

    Cato did not immediately die of the wound; but struggling, fell off the bed, and throwing down a little mathematical table that stood by, made such a noise that the servants, hearing it, cried out. And immediately his son and all his friends came into the chamber, where, seeing him lie weltering in his own blood, great part of his bowels out of his body, but himself still alive and able to look at them, they all stood in horror. The physician went to him, and would have put in his bowels, which were not pierced, and sewed up the wound; but Cato, recovering himself, and understanding the intention, thrust away the physician, plucked out his own bowels, and tearing open the wound, immediately expired.

    Thus, perished the man who has been described as “The Last Citizen of Rome.”  He opposed Caesar with all of his breath, standing for the founding principles of the Republic.  Personally, he was reputed to be a prickly, difficult man, and very likely a high-functioning alcoholic (hardly a novelty in those times.)  But he was a man of principle and, unlike most pols today, was willing to stick to his principles even unto death.

    Caesar, now, his story has been told, by Plutarch, Lucanus, Livy, Shakespeare and many more.  He won his war, was assassinated by a man who had been one of his closest friends, but his adopted son Octavian seized control and became, effectively, Rome’s first Emperor.

    You could very well argue that when Cato died, the Republic died with him.

    And where is our Cato today?

  • Allamakee County Chonicles V – The Goat Tree

    Note:  A preview from my upcoming autobiography, Life’s Too Short to Smoke Cheap Cigars (Or to Drink Cheap Whiskey.)

    The Goat Tree

    Goats have a sort of, well, aura.

    Some folks refer to it as a stench.  Personally, I don’t think that word quite covers it.  Goats are worse than skunks by almost any measure.

    The really unique thing about goats is that, unlike skunks, have a predilection to spread their aura across the countryside, on the wings of the breeze.  They do this by climbing – barns, trees, fence posts, rocks, almost anything higher than their natural stance.  The purpose of this is to spread the cloying smell of goat as far as possible across the countryside.

    In the Beginning…

    When I was a small and innocent boy, the route my parents took to get to town passed by a small farm that was home to several goats, including one old Billy known locally as “Old Stinky.”  That any goat, of all goats, was sufficiently rank to gain such an appellation as “Old Stinky” speaks volumes; in fact, there was muttering around the neighborhood about the owner of said farm, old man Andresen, conducting chemical warfare to drive down property values.  The fact that old man Andresen bought up a couple neighboring farms at bargain-basement prices seemed to bear that view out; at least that gave him room to run a few more goats, over which Old Stinky presided as uncontested patriarch.  Old Stinky took an inordinate amount of pride in his ability to drive away all manner of animals, insects, trespassers, and to turn green plants brown for twenty yards downwind.  He sure seemed to enjoy himself; nobody was certain how old man Andresen was able to take it.  Perhaps having the only fly and mosquito-free farm in northern Iowa was some compensation; flying insects of all sorts steered well clear of the Andresen place.  Not even horseflies braved Old Stinky’s presence.

    The road to town, as it passed the Andresen place, first dropped into the Canoe Creek valley and then made a sharp turn right at the driveway to the farm house.  At the end of the driveway, right next to the road, was the Goat Tree.  It was in this giant old oak tree that Old Stinky preferred to climb to announce his odiferous presence to the land.  To get past the Andresen place to town, you had to drive down into the valley, slow down to make the sharp turn, cross the bridge and then race up the steep hill on the other side of Canoe Creek to get away from Old Stinky’s presence.  The speed required to negotiate this obstacle was determined by how long the individual driver could hold his/her breath.

    The actual Canoe Creek, taken from that actual bridge. Really.

    Odoriferous things.

    Anyone who was blessed in having a rural upbringing gets pretty used to some nasty smells.  Some of my friends had parents who kept hogs, for example, and the domestic swine can make eyes water for several hundred yards downwind, even in the cleanest and best-kept of farms.  There are also skunks, the stuff of legend as far and nasty smells; skunks of course combine one of Nature’s foulest odors with the capacity to project that odor in a form that sticks with you for weeks.

    On one memorable occasion, my father found an injured turkey vulture.  The bird had a broken wing, and we determined that the right thing to do would be to catch it in Dad’s jacket, wrap it up and transport it some 40 miles to Elkader, where the Iowa Department of Natural Resources ran a rehab facility.

    The capture went fairly smoothly, and we were relieved when the bird didn’t smell too badly.  We placed him, wrapped tightly in Dad’s jacket to prevent injury (to him and us) placed him in the back of Dad’s station wagon, and set off southward.

    It seems incredible that a bird, accustomed to riding wind currents so gracefully hundreds of feet above the ground as turkey vultures do, would be subject to carsickness.

    We hadn’t covered one mile of the journey when our rescued vulture began to vomit.  And, dear reader, I ask you to contemplate the items that constitute fine dining to a vulture; throw in a few hours of digestion, and you still couldn’t possibly imagine the havoc this resulted in.  Prodigious quantities of partially processed vulture foodstuff were quickly deposited in the back of the car, until it seemed that surely there was more of it than bird.

    Tempting as it was to abandon car, bird and all, we stuck it out; Dad driving with his head out the window, eyes squinted against the wind, Mom hanging out the passenger side window, gulping in fresh air; and myself, gagging in the back seat, threatening to join the bird at any moment.

    Turkey Vulture. They stink, too.

    It seemed things couldn’t possibly get any worse, but then we turned the bend and began the descent into the Canoe Creek valley.

    As we approached the Goat Tree, Dad let out a yelp and pulled his head in.  Mom did likewise; even in a car filled with vulture vomit, the presence of Old Stinky pervaded the auto, seeping in even as we frantically rolled up the windows. Old Stinky was in place; sensing a challenge, he had climbed out on a stout limb overhanging the road where he stood proudly, head thrown back in a victorious bleat.

    On a hunch, I risked a look over the back of my seat.  The vulture was trying to get his head stuck under a wing, and his normally red head was showing a distinct green tinge.  Somehow I don’t think the ride was responsible.  Old Stinky had written another chapter in his legend; no other animal could make even a vulture gag.

    His Greatest Coup

    Old Stinky lived for many a year, and it was not until I had reached the age of 17 that the final episode in his legend took place.  Old Stinky went out in style, though; his demise involved a pretty brunette from town, a halter-top, a convertible, and a steep ditch.

    The story began a few weeks before my 17th birthday, when I took to keeping company with a cute little dark-haired girl from town.  Rhonda had a trim figure, long legs, dark hair, dark eyes, and parts that protruded and curved in all the right places, in all the right ways.

    Rhonda’s father, Mr. Walters, (“but you best call me ‘Sir,’ boy”) was less than enchanted with the liaison; Rhonda came from a town family with money, and her Dad wasn’t too pleased with his baby girl taking up with a long-haired, slightly bedraggled woods bum who earned extra money by trapping muskrats, ate with his Buck knife and dressed up for company by putting on a clean black t-shirt and knocking the dirt off his steel-toed engineer boots.  I never did figure out why Mr. Walters could never seem to remember my name, and made up for his memory lapse by referring to me as “Worthless.”

    Still, Rhonda and I went out for several weeks, and enjoyed each other’s company a great deal.  Things had progressed to the point of exchanging smooches in the front seat of my ancient Ford when Rhonda’s Dad presented her with the gift of a nicely restored 1966 Mustang convertible.  This was too good to be believed; on the great day that Rhonda took delivery of the Mustang, she called me to announce the great news, and offer me a spin around the countryside.

    Early October in Northeast Iowa brings some of the most beautiful Indian summer days you’ll see anywhere.  The day that saw Rhonda pull into my folk’s driveway in her new Mustang, the sun was shining, the thermometer was in the eighties, the Mustang’s top was down, and Rhonda was enchantingly dressed in cut-off shorts and a white halter top.  I was decked out in my finest; jeans that still had knees, a black t-shirt with no holes, and I even stopped to knock the mud off my engineer boots before vaulting over the door into the passenger seat.  And away we went!

    The day was indeed wondrous; occasional stops for a bit of cuddling made it more wondrous still.

    Not Rhonda, but much the same.

    I guess it was the halter-top that was to blame.  For those of you who don’t remember, halter-tops in the late Seventies generally consisted of a small triangle of cloth with four strings; the cloth was just large enough to cover the strategic portions of a girl’s chest, and two ties at the nape of the neck and two at the mid-back secured the whole thing in place.  It was probably due to Rhonda’s halter-top commanding my entire attention (to be honest, it was the bow-knotted string ties I found particularly intriguing) that I didn’t notice her taking the turn down into the Canoe Creek valley.

    The nose of the Mustang dipped as the road took the first turn down towards the Andresen place, and I noticed the aura…  ever so faintly, the aura, of…

    Old Stinky.

    Rhonda seemed oblivious as we rounded the last bend, chatting happily away, one arm on the top of the door, one on the steering wheel, her left knee raised in a manner to take the breath away from a young man.

    But it wasn’t the sight of Rhonda’s thigh that was taking my breath away.  It was the sight of Old Stinky, out on his favored limb on the Goat Tree, casting his evil gaze at the oncoming Mustang.

    Old Stinky was wise in the ways of cars.  Old Stinky knew that, in a convertible with the top down, there was no escape.  Old Stinky was ready.  Out on the end of his favored limb, right over the road, Old Stinky threw back his head and bleated his triumph once more to the world.  His miasma descended to cover the road to our immediate front.

    “Say,” Rhonda asked, “Do you smell something?”

    “HIT THE GAS!”  I shouted.  Rhonda turned to me, a concerned look on her face, and then we both looked upwards.  As we passed under the Goat Tree, we heard the sound; the awful sound, the horrifying sound.  The sound of Old Stinky’s limb breaking.

    It seems Old Stinky had been putting on some weight as he got on in years.  The limb that safely supported him in his prime was dangerously fragile now.  I was told some time later by a saddened old man Andresen that Old Stinky hadn’t been out on his perch in a year or more.  It was only the irresistible sight of an oncoming convertible that drove Stinky, in spite of his advanced age, to one last feat of stenching.

    With a loud crack, the limb gave way, pitching Old Stinky into the Mustang’s back seat.

    Rhonda let out a screech that would have made a wildcat green with envy.  She yanked the Mustang to the left, then to the right.  Old Stinky staggered to his feet on the back seat, and fighting to keep his balance, grabbed in his long, snaggled teeth the only thing that presented itself, that being the top ties to Rhonda’s halter.

    Rhonda screeched louder still.  In what I imagined to be a chivalrous move, I started hammering Old Stinky’s head with my left fist; it was then I learned that an aged Billy goat’s skull is the approximate hardness of marble.  The only result was a badly bruised fist.  I had to some up with another course of action, fast; my vision was starting to get blurry, and Rhonda was starting the dry heaves.  A plan came to mind, and I shouted it at her.

    “STOP THE CAR!”

    Rhonda’s right foot came down hard on the brake pedal, and the Mustang’s wheels locked, sending the car careening into the steep ditch on the opposite side of the road.  The Mustang slammed hard against the side of the ditch; Rhonda’s seat belt held, and she only bounced off the steering wheel enough to give her a slight bruise on her forehead.  As for myself, in a display of teenage machismo I hadn’t fastened my seat belt, and so was slammed against the dashboard with rib-cracking force.

    Old Stinky, though, fared least well of all.  Still gripping the top ties to Rhonda’s halter, he was catapulted upwards, over Rhonda’s head, over the windshield, and a good fifty feet into the cornfield just ahead.  A trail of stench followed Old Stinky overhead, much like the wake of a boat; as he passed, he kept his grip on Rhonda’s halter ties.  The top ties held, but the bottom ties gave way; my last sight of Old Stinky was of his airborne figure, trailing Rhonda’s detached halter top, sailing into the rows of golden cornstalks.

    Not Old Stinky, but much the same.

    I’m saddened to report that Old Stinky didn’t survive his first experience with unassisted flight.  After all his malign intent, after all his evil smell, Old Stinky was a local institution, and it’s always sad to see a legend pass on.

    I’m still more saddened to report that, while we didn’t dare follow Old Stinky into the corn in search of Rhonda’s halter, she did have a blanket in the trunk of the Mustang, in which she wrapped herself up tightly and drove me in silence back to my parent’s house.  The thoughts of what the original intent Rhonda had in placing a blanket in the back of her car frustrated me for years afterwards.

    I didn’t see Rhonda again after that.  I guess the initial attraction was overcome by the association with the trauma of her banged-up Mustang and the odoriferous presence of Old Stinky, which never did come out of the upholstery.  Rhonda instead took up with a boy from town, a boy from a family with money.  I’m told that Mr. Walters (“I always told you he was worthless”) was pleased with the way things turned out.

    And Then…

    It turned out that Old Stinky left a legacy, after all.  A genetic legacy, one that curses the Canoe Creek valley to this day.  It was many years later, on a visit to my parents at my childhood home with my own family, that I learned that Old Stinky’s name is not forgotten.  During the course of a pleasant vacation at my Mom and Dad’s home, with my wife and two little girls, we decided one afternoon to take a drive to town.  As we turned our truck into the Canoe Creek valley, my wife turned to me.

    “Honey,” she asked, “Do you smell something?”

    “It stinks, Daddy!” our little girls chirped from the back seat.

    I looked up, and there, on the Goat Tree, stood a younger version of Old Stinky, on another limb overhanging the road, head thrown back, a victorious bleat ringing forth from a young and healthy set of lungs.

    A strange feeling came over me, and not just because of the smell.  It was a feeling that combined nausea, nostalgia, and an overall warm, fuzzy feeling that some things, some legends, can never die.

    My wife didn’t understand my expression, even as we drove through the clinging cloud of stench Young Stinky let loose to waft down onto the road, even as we all were gagging and our eyes watering…

    I was smiling.

  • Allamakee County Chronicles IV – Dad’s Guns

    Note:  A preview from my upcoming autobiography, Life’s Too Short to Smoke Cheap Cigars (Or to Drink Cheap Whiskey.)

    Dad

    Dad, 1950

    How to begin to describe my father?

    I could summarize by saying he was the finest man I ever knew.  But there was a lot more to him than that.  You can tell a lot about a man by his possessions:  The kind of car or truck he drives, the way he dresses, and so on.  But I’ve always said that, in the case of my father, you could tell quite a lot about his intensely practical, personally and financially conservative lifestyle by his guns – not only which guns he owned, but also by the fact that three guns served him for almost his entire ninety-four years of life.

    This is the story of my Dad’s guns.

    Early On…

    Like most of Dad’s generation, he was a World War II veteran, having served from early 1943 to early 1946.  He was a second lieutenant in the US Army Air Corps and trained as a navigator.  When the war ended the Army wasn’t quite ready to let Dad go yet.  He had shipped to Victorville, CA to learn the new art of radar navigation, but on VJ Day there was suddenly much less need for qualified B-29 crew, so Dad was at odds until someone asked him if he’d like to help run the post skeet range.

    In those days as in the rest of his life, Dad hated having nothing to do, so he said “sure,” and ended up working with the first lieutenant who ran the ranges.  The skeet range, part of the overall qualification and training range complex, existed as a recreational opportunity for troops rotating back from the Pacific, but (perhaps understandably) most of those guys had done enough shooting to suit them for a while.

    So, Dad and the other officer shot.  A lot.  As in, hundreds of rounds a day.  Not just shotguns, either, as whenever the range received a shipment of ammo, the OICs were required to test a certain number of rounds from each shipment.  So, in addition to hundreds of rounds on the skeet range, Dad and his partner shot M1 carbines and, to test the shipments of .45ACP, M1 Thompsons and M3 Grease Guns, because why would you shoot a pistol if you have submachine guns that use the same round?

    Despite how much fun Dad was having shooting guns all day, when the Army finally got around to letting him go home, he grabbed the chance.  Part of the deal was that the Army would ship, gratis, one issue wooden Army footlocker with whatever Dad chose to put in it.

    Dad took a footlocker out to the range and filled it to the brim with 12-gauge shells.  He took that in to be shipped, stuck his extra uniforms in a suitcase, and boarded a train for Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where my grandfather was waiting for him.

    It so happened that, up in the town of Independence, Dad also had a girl waiting for him.  In March of 1947 that girl became his wife and, some years later, my Mom, but that’s a story for another time.

    The Guns

    Before the war Dad had been in the habit of borrowing his older brother’s ’97 Winchester when he wanted to go hunting, but with a footlocker full of 12-gauge shells and his demobilization pay in his pocket, he decided he needed his own shotgun, and so went forthwith into the pages of the Sears-Roebuck catalog where he ordered a Sears store-brand “J.C. Higgins 102.25” 12-gauge pump, which was a Stevens 520A in Sears trim.  At some point, Dad sent the gun off to the original Waseca, Minnesota Herter’s shop for a Herter’s brand collet-type poly-choke, making the old gun even more versatile.

    The 520A is a good, solid pump-gun.  As are so many American sporting arms, this one was the product of the mind of John Browning, the DaVinci of firearms, and bears the characteristic Browning “humpback” on the steel receiver.  During the war the Army bought quite a few of them in riot trim for MPs and such, and after that unpleasantness both Sears and Montgomery Wards sold them in store-brand trim. Dad now had a tool with which to put all his skeet-range experience to good use with, and when he took up a small farm near Independence in the fall of 1946, he put that skill to work bringing in rabbits and pheasants for the table.

    As I’ve noted in a couple of previous articles, if you can have only one gun, a 12-gauge pump is the gun to have.  Now you all know where I picked up that attitude originally, although I still adhere to that thinking after forty-plus years of shooting and collecting.

    Dad married my Mom in March of 1947.  For their third anniversary, Mom wanted to find Dad something enjoyable and practical for an anniversary present – and what could be more enjoyable and practical than a .22 rifle?  Mom enjoyed plinking with a .22 rifle herself and figured that a good .22 would increase Dad’s efficiency at producing the prime ingredient of rabbit stews as well as dealing with the vermin that inevitably become a problem on a farm.

    Mom knew as much about guns as your average 22-year old girl who had grown up on a farm during the Depression, which was more than most 22-year old girls today would.  She figured that the Coast-to-Coast in Oelwein would have what she was looking for.

    By this time the folks had moved to a larger farm near Fairbank, Iowa.  Neither Fairbank nor the nearby town of Readlyn boasted a hardware store in those days, so Mom went off to Oelwein, a larger town about fifteen miles east of the farm.  (As it happened, in 1961, Oelwein became the birthplace of one of eastern Iowa’s more notable former residents – me.)

    In that year of 1950, Mossberg had introduced yet another variation of their standard .22LR semi-auto.  These old guns fed via a tubular magazine not under the barrel but through the stock.  The latest version in that year featured a long 24” barrel and an unadorned black walnut stock with a Schnabel fore-end.  Mom kicked in the extra shekels for a long, skinny, steel-tubed 4X Mossberg scope and presented the rifle to Dad on the day of their third anniversary.

    Recently I advocated for the use of a bolt gun for a homestead’s .22 rifle, but the semi-auto from Mossberg proved accurate and reliable, although limited to .22 LR ammo.  On one winter afternoon, when a flock of geese landed in a plowed field to glean corn, the Mossberg proved accurate enough to hit one squarely in the head at a bit over 100 yards, which was as close as Dad could get working his way down the fencerow.  Corn-fed roast goose makes a pretty fair Sunday dinner.

    The last piece was the only one purchased purely for recreation.  Neither Mom nor Dad remembered later exactly what the year was, but at some point, in the early Sixties they decided it would be fun to have a handgun for a little recreational plinking.

    As it happens, a few years earlier Bill Ruger had introduced his rugged, reliable little Standard Auto in .22LR.  And this being in the pre-1968 GCA world, the folks were able to mail-order their new 6” barreled Standard and have it sent to the house.  Amazingly, nobody died – imagine that.

    My Mom was quite fond of plinking with Ruger’s little pistol and got to be quite an accomplished shot.  I remember her shooting bottle caps at 10-15 yards, and she would regularly shoot spent shotgun shells off the tops of fenceposts.  Dad was a pretty fair shot, but when it came to the handgun, I honestly think Mom had him beat.

    These were the three guns my Dad used through his career – these, and no others.  Consider the three pieces described:  There are prettier guns, fancier guns, with nicer wood and shinier finishes.  But the three guns here were all solid, utilitarian pieces, utterly dependable – like Dad.

    As I Grew

    Dad started teaching me to shoot when I was five or six years old.

    I started out with a simple BB gun borrowed from an uncle, probably a Daisy lever-action; at this distance in time, I really can’t remember.  When I was about ten, I was gifted my first in a series of Crosman pump-up Model 760 bb/pellet guns, of which I wore out several between the ages of about ten and sixteen.

    Dad and me, 1964

    At twelve or so I had moved on to shooting Dad’s .22 rifle and pistol, at first under his direct supervision until he was satisfied I could handle them safely.  Around that time, I received a Mossberg 20-gauge pump as a birthday present, the handling and maintenance of which Dad also instructed me in.

    No Army drill sergeant ever hammered anyone harder on gun safety.  I was drilled on muzzle control, on keeping my finger off the trigger until actually ready to shoot, on opening the action and clearing the chamber every time I picked up the gun even if I had just set it down moments before.  Dad always pointed out that a gun, like so many other tools found around a country place, were potentially dangerous instruments, and that a moment’s inattention could cause a serious injury or death.  He taught me how to shoot his guns and guns I later got for myself, how to maintain them, how to hit what I was aiming at and to do so responsibly.  When hunting, he taught me the importance of sportsmanship, of showing respect for the game, of being mindful that the birds and animals weren’t just targets, but that I was taking a life – and how that life and mine fit in with the greater scheme of things.

    His lessons are still with me today.  It is because of those lessons that I am still extremely discriminating on who I will go hunting or shooting with.

    But more than that, Dad taught me what the guns were to be used for.  We hunted pheasants and grouse, squirrels, rabbits, ducks, all the small game Iowa had to offer.  Dad had more or less quit hunting deer by the time I was big enough to give that a go but was always pleased at my proficiency in bringing big corn-fed Iowa whitetails to bag.

    Over the years I increasingly went on solo adventures, or out with my friends.  But I never got tired of watching Dad shoot a shotgun.  He had an uncanny knack for knowing where an evasive ruffed grouse might dodge through our timber and was adept at arranging for an ounce of # 7 ½ shot to be placed at a predetermined location that coincided with the bird’s arrival.

    His Legacy

    I see a little bit of Dad whenever I look in the mirror.  And not just because I share the characteristic Clark nose and Dad’s shaggy eyebrows.

    I can hear Dad’s precautionary voice every time I pick up a firearm.  Sometimes I take his old Stevens out to shoot a round of trap, and I usually draw a comment or two from our gun club regulars who are used to seeing me with my Citori or one of my Model 12s; but when I explain that this was my Dad’s gun, they almost always nod knowingly.  They get it.

    His old Mossberg .22 is still a tack-driver.  I killed a small mountain of squirrels and rabbits with it back in the day, and it still shoots as well as it did then.  Ditto for the .22 Ruger; only a year or so back I killed a dinner’s worth of Colorado mountain grouse with it.

    And as time went by, I taught my own kids and now my grandkids how to safely and responsibly handle firearms.  The lessons Dad passed on to me have been repeated, over and over.  They are as important now as they were then.  And now, today, Dad’s guns stand in my own gun rack, still cleaned, lightly oiled and ready.

    How It Stands Today

    Mom and Dad – 1947, 2017

    Dad’s been gone about a year and a half now.  He was 94, and my four siblings and I are in our fifties (only me, now) sixties and seventies.  When Dad left us, it was like a light went out in Mom.  After losing her husband of seventy-one years, she clearly had little interest in going on alone and followed him after only eight months.  Now my siblings and I look at each other and realize that now we’re the seniors; we are the Grandmas and Grandpas.

    We go through life knowing that one day our parents will be gone.  We had ours for a good long time, and they had each other for a good long time.  I miss them both still.  I miss my Dad, every single day.  It took me a while to get used to that empty place in my life where a giant once strode.  But everything I am, everything I know about being a man, a husband, a father and a grandfather is because of him, and one tangible reminder I have of that I have described here:  His guns.  Nothing fancy or ostentatious, just good solid utility, scrupulously maintained, practical and tough, always standing ready for whatever might happen.

    Not a bad way to be remembered.