Schwing says the SKEET Grade was introduced in '36.
Do you have the '36 catalogue?
Beat me to it Bob. Here (referenced for the third time) is the quote from Schwing's book on page 108:
"Introduced earlier in the Tournament and Trap Grades as a sub-grade, 1936 was the first year for the Skeet Grade as a grade unto itself."
But Researcher did post some later catalog references about the "Skeet Gun" in other grades. I think when Winchester began treating the gun as a separate grade in terms of distinct features, the marketing guys for their own reasons resisted and continued producing catalogs consistent with it being a sub-grade. It makes no sense to me that Cody and others working from original internal records (
in addition to the advertising material) would all choose to invent a non-existent "grade" inconsistent with the catalogs.
As we've seen in this thread, Cody continues to report Skeet Grade for individual guns from those records.
Inconsistency isn't all that surprising, we know too that Winchester pretty routinely made guns per order that differed from their normal offerings. The business of the M-21 was not what we think of today as "businesslike".
Jay
