I started the post months ago, but couldn’t do anything with it before now because of image uploading issues and Bluehost’s refusal to assist with those.
Bluehost upgraded my WordPress instance for this blog a few days ago, and image uploading seems to be working slightly better, so I think I can post this now and see what happens.
My intent when I started this was to dangle some stinky old bait in the water to see if a specific person took the bait.
Jump goes here.
I’ve been involved in some recent conversations about two things that are sort of connected.
Apparently, the word for the 250th anniversary of something is “Semiquincentennial”. Wikipedia, the source of all vaguely accurate knowledge, also says “Sestercentennial” is acceptable. Also: “Quarter Millennium”, and in the context of the upcoming anniversary, “America250”. “America250” sounds kind of silly and undignified to me. “America! 250! With purchase of an America of equal or greater value!”
I was feeling like nobody gives a diddly squat about the Semiquincentennial. I haven’t seen people talking about it, or announced plans for a big celebration, or any commemorative items. I’m old enough to (somewhat) remember the run-up to the Bicentennial. I may even have some Bicentennial quarters somewhere.
It turns out that there’s actually a federally chartered “non-partisan” planning committee, the “United States Semiquincentennial Commission“, which was spun up in 2016. It also turns out that President Trump has created “The White House Task Force on Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday“, aka “Task Force 250”. I like “Task Force 250”. “Task Force 250, engage the guns on Mount Suribachi.”
(We watched “Sands of Iwo Jima” over the weekend. I like it, but I would not say it was one of John Wayne’s best films.)
And, of course, the NYT has to micturate all over the idea.
I wonder if we’re going to see any commemorative guns for the 250th anniversary. And I don’t mean guns like the various “Trump 2025” and “47” guns you see around. I mean some really classy commemoratives, of the kind gun makers used to issue in the old days. And speaking of the old days…
For some reason, Mike and I were talking about my Smith and Wesson Model 544, the “Texas Wagon Train Commemorative”, for the 150th anniversary of Texas independence. While we were talking, I got to wondering: did any other manufacturers issue Texas Sesquicentennial guns? Surely there was a commemorative Winchester, right? Winchester issued more commemoratives than Carter had little liver pills.
Oh, if only I had some reference work on Winchester commemorative guns. Oh, wait! I do!
Volume One of the Trolard books says that Winchester was going to produce a full-length rifle, a carbine, and a cased set with both the rifle and carbine as well as a Bowie knife. The first volume came out in 1985, so Mr. Trolard was writing ahead of actual release. (He does have photos of the guns, which I’m guessing were factory supplied.)
Then it gets weird, and frankly unclear to me. There’s a reference early on in the second volume to “the unfortunate event with the termination of the production for the Texas Sesquicentennial program”, but not much more detail than that. At least some Texas Sesquicentennial guns made it out of the factory, as you can find auctions for them online. U.S Repeating Arms Company (the parent company of Winchester at the time) shut down the Winchester commemoratives program in 1987. They contracted with Cherry’s Sporting Goods to “design, create and market” commemoratives in 1989. This is about the same time that USRA went bankrupt and was bought by Fabrique Nationale Herstal.
(Some of the Texas Sesquicentennial guns were re-purposed as Larry Bird commemoratives, per Trolard. Really, I’m not making this up. There were Larry Bird commemorative Winchesters sold through “Larry Bird’s Boston Connection” with serial numbers that started with “TSR”. “More commemoratives than Carter had little liver pills” indeed.)
And what about Colt? I’m not as up on Colts, and don’t have as many Colt references as I’d like. But it seems like Colt did a Texas Sesquicentennial commemorative Single Action Army. All the ones I have seen for sale so far have ivory grips. Here’s one example from GunBroker.
Mike the Musicologist also turned up a Colt 1860 Army Texas Sesquicentennial commemorative. The listing he found claims they are very rare: here’s one listed and sold by Collectors Firearms.
The Texas Sesquicentennial Colts are listed in the online Blue Book of Gun Values, but that’s weird, too: the site shows a “Colt 1985 Texas 150th Sesquicentennial SAA Premier Model” that looks like the SAA with ivory grips, and a “Colt 1985 Texas 150th Sesquicentennial SAA Standard Model” that looks like an 1860 Army, not a SAA.
There is also a “Texas Sam Houston 150th Sesquicentennial Deluxe U.S. Model 1847 Walker .44 Caliber Blackpowder Cap & Ball Revolver” listed on GunBroker right now, but that seems to be more of a Sam Houston commemorative than a Texas Sesquicentennial one. Also, it doesn’t look like it was produced by Colt, but made by the “United States Historical Society” using an Uberti Walker reproduction.
I kind of think it would be fun to have a collection of all the Texas Sesquicentennial guns, at least the official manufacturer produced ones. But I don’t think I want to scratch that itch right away…
…that Single Action Army with ivory grips does look pretty, though.
If any of my readers are Colt people, and can fill in some of the blanks on Colt commemoratives, or can point to a good reference work, please drop a comment here.
I’ve been in kind of a dry spell for vintage gun books. But that broke this week: I have four on the way from Callahan and Company (and I ordered them before Thanksgiving, so I can get away with this), and will be blogging those when they arrive.
In the meantime, though, I’m not working on Black Friday. I did swing by Half-Price Books and picked up two more Gun Digests I didn’t have: 1969, with an article by James E. Serven about “Captain Samuel H. Walker”, and 2022, with an article by Terry Wieland about “The Colt Walker”. I’ll tie this back at the end.
Let us get started…
My regular readers know that one of the obsessions of this blog is the Inverted Jenny.
Inverted Jenny #49 is going up for sale again.
Here are some good images of it.
In other news, I had an interesting discussion at my local gun shop last night. I went in on Monday because I got hosed out of going on Saturday (NOT THAT I’M BITTER OR ANYTHING.)
The used gun buyer was there. He’d been out sick for a couple of weeks, so this is the first time in a while that I’d seen him, and we spent some time catching up.
My regular readers also know that one of the obsessions of this blog is the pre-1964 Model 70 Winchester. They’ve had one on the shelf for a few weeks: based on the serial number, it’s a 1949 gun complete with a Lyman Alaskan 4x scope. I jokingly referred to it as “the Jack O’Connor starter kit”.1
The gun buyer told me, “Oh, yeah. That gun belonged to some famous Hollywood guy. Give me a minute and I’ll tell you who.” So he went back through his emails and eventually found it. That Model 70 previously belonged to…
Sid Caeser.
Yes, Sid “Your Show of Shows” Caeser. Sid “dangled Mel Brooks out of an 18th story window” Caeser. Sid “punched a horse” Caeser. That one.
The past was another country, and lots of celebrities owned guns back then, so this shouldn’t be so surprising to me. I think it might be the odd combination of someone who you don’t think of as a gun guy owning guns, and that gun showing up in an Austin gun shop.
People often say, “You’re not paying for the gun, you’re paying for the story behind it.” So how do I know this story is true?
There’s backup for it. I checked the serial number, and it’s right.
I wasn’t considering purchasing it. The gun fund is a little tight, we’re planning to go to a gun show in November, and I’m lucky enough to already have temporary custody of one pre-64 Model 70 in .270 Winchester. But the associational element, combined with the price, is making me think.
The same shop also has a few more of Sid’s guns: there’s an older Husqvarna bolt gun in .308, a Sako (which they may have sold: the gun buyer couldn’t find it on the rack) and I think they also got a couple of Sid’s Browning shotguns.
1. As you know, Bob, especially if you’ve been around me long enough, Jack O’Connor was a big fan of the pre-64 Winchester Model 70, especially in .270 Winchester. And the very thinly disguised version of Jack O’Connor in Stephen Hunter’s Pale Horse Coming uses a pre-64 Model 70 in .270 Winchester with a Lyman Alaskan 4x scope to great effect.
One of the problems joys of being a hoplobibliophile (as opposed to being a normal person, or even a normal book collector): you buy a book on a particular gun for some reason. It might be well put together and illustrated, or it might just be cheap. Whatever. Next thing you know…you’re wanting the gun to go with the book.
I missed it, but I hope not by too much.
May 5th was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Herb Parsons. I, of course, was on the road at the time: even if I hadn’t been, I was unaware of this until yesterday, when a copy of Showman Shooter: The Life and Times of Herb Parsons came into my hands.
Who was Herb Parsons? He was a famous exhibition shooter: he worked for Winchester from 1929 until his untimely death in 1959 (with, of course, a break during WWII, where he served as a gunnery instructor). Quoting from the Showman Shooter website:
His sons, Lynn and Jerry, are working to keep Herb’s legacy alive. The Showman Shooter website offers copies of the book, and videos of Herb, Ad and Plinky Toepperwein, John Satterwhite, and the excellent compilation, “Fast and Fancy Shooters”, along with some more background about Herb. I commend the site to your attention, and will be sending off a check for the DVD soon.
Here are a couple of videos that aren’t on the website, but that I think are interesting:
Remember that blog post from yesterday about the Toepperwein/Frye book?
I didn’t know anything about this at the time, and didn’t find out until great and good friend of the blog Karl (also official firearms trainer of WCD) sent along a link to the NRA Blog.
Ad Toepperwein’s Colt Target Revolver.
As you know, Bob, I’m a Smith and Wesson man myself, but I have to admit that is a pretty Colt.
She sounds like the kind of person very few people are lucky enough to find.
This also gives me a chance to mention something I forgot yesterday: Mr. Toepperwein was a native Texan, born in Bourne (between Austin and San Antonio), died in San Antonio.
(Also: I noticed that I wasn’t consistent in the spelling of his last name: “Toepperwein” versus “Topperwein”. I probably ought to go back and clean that up a little, but I’ve seen it rendered both ways in other sources. The NRA Blog says “Folks at Winchester weren’t slow to capitalize on the husband and wife combination and dubbed the pair, the ‘Famous Topperweins’. Ad had lost an ‘e’ from his surname with Winchester advertising, but had gained an enthusiastic partner.”)
This is not a review or an endorsement, since I only picked this up yesterday and haven’t read it yet. But I do want to put in a quick plug for it: it was published last year by Texas Tech University Press and I am afraid it has already fallen into obscurity. I didn’t know anything about it until I stumbled on a copy at Half-Price Books.
Shooting for the Record: Adolph Toepperwein, Tom Frye, and Sharpshooting’s Forgotten Controversy is a book about Topperwein, Frye, exhibition shooting, and the world record controversy.
Back in the old days, the various gun companies paid “exhibition shooters” to travel around the country and put on shooting demonstrations with their products. Adolf “Ad” Topperwein was a shooter for Winchester (along with his wife, known as “Plinky”). At one point, Mr. Topperwein held the world record for aerial shooting: “…more than 72,000 hand thrown blocks 2½ inches in diameter, and missing only nine“.
Then Tom Frye came along. Mr. Frye was an exhibition shooter for Remington, and was a little younger than Mr. Topperwein. In 1959, he used the then newly introduced Remington Nylon 66 rifle to shoot 100,010 wooden blocks over a 14-day period, hitting 100,004 of them and breaking Mr. Topperwein’s record. However, Mr. Topperwein apparently felt that Mr. Frye’s setup wasn’t entirely fair: specifically, the distance Mr. Frye was shooting at was too short, and Mr. Frye’s throwers were using a different technique that made it easier for him to hit. (Also, the Nylon 66 was much lighter, and thus easier to hold for long periods, than the Winchester rifles that Mr. Topperwein used.)
As I said, I haven’t read the whole book yet, but I did get through the author’s preface. One of the things that interested him about the Frye/Topperwein controversy was that Mr. Frye may have actually been using “performance enhancing drugs” in his record attempt, predating Barry Bonds by about 40 years.
This book pushes a couple of my hot buttons. In the past couple of years, I’ve become more interested in the 20th Century exhibition shooters, like the Topperwins and Frye and Herb Parsons and others. (There’s a pretty good DVD, “Fast and Fancy Shooters“, that has vintage footage of some of these people at work. Link goes to Amazon, but I was able to find it cheaper on eBay when I bought it.)
In addition, I have my own personal reasons for being interested in Mr. Frye: one of these days Real Soon Now, I’m going to finish the long post I started a while back about my Nylon 66, Tom Frye, and childhood nostalgia.
In general, out of my group of shooting friends, I think I’m the most interested in shooting history of the bunch. I expect this to be a swell addition to my library, and I encourage anyone who has a set of buttons like mine to pick up a copy.
On a semi-related side note, you know who else is interested in firearms history? Karl of KR Training, official firearms trainer of Whipped Cream Difficulties. I bring this up here because he’s been working on a series of “Historical Handgun” courses: the first one was a 1/2 day course he ran this past weekend, and he has a full day class coming up in September. For personal reasons, I can’t attend, but I’m looking forward to the two-day version of the class he plans to run sometime in 2018.
In the meantime, though, he’s got some blog entries up: an after action report on the 1/2 day class, discussion of the FBI’s qualification course circa 1945, and even a couple of book reviews. I encourage my readers to give Karl’s blog some affection, even if you do live too far away to enroll in his classes.
(I think it’d be kind of fun, though, if Karl could develop this into a sort of standard curriculum and share it with instructors in other regions. It might be fun to have people all over the country running these classes and showing how it was done in the old days. Heck, maybe we could make this a thing, like cowboy action shooting and the zoot shooters: combat matches with “appropriate” guns from different eras. This could be a whole bunch of fun.)
The HouChron ran an article about the various official state weapons, tied to Tennessee naming the Barrett M82 as the official state rifle.
Problem is, as part of the continuing creeping BuzzFeedification of the HouChron, it was a shallow slideshow. So instead I’ll link to Wikipedia’s list. Thoughts:
In other news, Lawrence’s review of “Hail, Caeser!” is up. I think he liked it more that I did, but I also don’t think we’re all that far apart on it. Elaborating on a couple of Lawrence’s points (some spoilers):
Obit watch: Phil Africa, “a high-ranking member of the Philadelphia-based black-liberation group Move”. You may remember MOVE from the 1985 Philadelphia police stand-off and bombing. Phil Africa was not involved in that, as he was already serving time for killing a police officer in the 1978 shootout.
I’m just going to take a wild guess here and suggest he was wearing body armor because HE DIDN’T WANT TO GET SHOT!
(Oh, and for the record: both the gun and body armor were stolen from a sheriff’s deputy.)
Neat story:
Some more detail here and here. (Interestingly, at the time I’m writing this, that story is the most-read one on the WP website.)
If you’ve got a week off, and you live in a relatively free state, why not schedule a range day?
And if you’re doing that, why not bring the middle nephew:
especially since he got a pair of Say Uncle endorsed active muffs for Christmas?
(I wanted to bring the two older boys, too, but for logistical and other reasons I wasn’t able to make that work.)
So we went out to Best of the West in Liberty Hill. I had not shot there before (though I’d been there once for LaRue’s Range Day). I was actually pretty happy with the range; everyone we dealt with was polite and friendly, and we managed to get an entire 50 yard bay to ourselves. (I only felt like we needed 50 yards, since all I brought with me was .22LR stuff for the novice shooter.)
Yes, technically, Buy a Gun Day was yesterday. However, I can’t really get down to my local gunshop from work before 6 PM in crosstown Austin traffic. So I stretched things a little. Is that a crime?
Actually, this one has been on lawaway at Tex-Guns since the first part of the year, and it was just a happy coincidence the the payoff date corresponded to BAG Day.
That’s a Winchester Model 9422 Legacy. Tex-Guns sold it new to someone back in 1986 (if I remember the date correctly), and they came back in a few months ago and put it on consignment. It came with the original box and paperwork.
I need another .22 rifle like I need another 1911, or another hole in my head, but this one is beautiful; I’d put it at 99%+. I’m not even sure it has been fired. And it goes well with my pre-64 Model 94.
(Also, I have a sneaking suspicion that this one is going to end up in the hands of one of my nephews at some point, when his parents decide he’s ready for a real rifle. That is, if it suits him. If not, well, let’s just say my nephews have some choices.)
(Carlos Hathcock, call your office, please.)
Adding a little visual element to the photo are two books that I picked up recently: The Story of the Winchester 1 of 1000 and 1 of 100 Rifles
Edited to add 4/17:
Just for grins, and because I was killing some time before meeting folks for breakfast, I decided to do a second photo:
The 9422 is on the bottom: the top gun is my pre-’64 Model 94 in .30-30. One of my projects when school lets out for the summer is do some work on getting a proper setup for doing gun photos. My current setup is improvised and clunky.