Many kids just are too spastic to shoot a .22 rifle well offhand until they are almost in their 'teens. I know; I was one. Add to that the fact that many of the entry-level .22 single shots had TRULY lousy triggers; my first gun was a Remington 514 which had about a half-hour trigger pull. Not what you want for running jackrabbits and frisky ground squirrels. So I got a Win M37 .410--(I may be related to Halvey) and pretty well extincted the ground squirrels in the vicinity of our ranchhouse (my older brother still remarks on my un-sporting nature). I was focussed on the 25-cent bounty my dad had on them and on the fact that he told me they carried bubonic plague (not an old wive's tale, by the way).

To get back On Track, I would nominate the A.J. Aubrey 12 and 16 hammerless doubles (Were they really "Crescents"?). You could buy them out of the Sears and Wards catalogs. They held up OK and were affordable; more reliable than the JABCs you could get from the same sources. In my area of California, there were many Italian-Americans in the country and for them the 16 was IT.