We used to spend hours reading their catalogue and laughing at the generally outragous claims made for virtually anything & everything they sold. Thot their rotary fletcher was perhaps the funniest thing they listed. Many of those .401's, if not all, were made by Sauer. Still have one of their CF presses, big, heavy like a Bulldog truck and Panzer tank tough. George wrote a couple of books too. Don't recall the exact titles, but they were in your face funny titles. Was just too embaressed to order either .. I'da got a whipping for sure. Still fish with some of their lure making components, spoon bodies w/red glass beady eyes & such that I bought in quantity while in Jr. High [mid-school]. One of the guys that I worked with some years ago grew up down the road from Herter and he told some funny tales and spoke very well of them. I was reading their catalogs at the same time I was subscribing to Boy's Life & Scientific American and taking a correspondence course from the Northwestern School of Taxidermy and riding a Dootlebug scooter powered by a 5S Briggs & Stratton lawn mower engine .. all things from a somewhat now removed spent youth, but one I would never trade.
Might as well face it ... as adults some of us try & make enough money to do the things we did as kids for nothing. Others are trying to buy yuts(sic)they feel they were deprived of .. ,e.g. a GT40 in the Home Depot parking lot .. 'bout the same as a name gun being used in a turkey shoot ;-) ;-) [wink wink] Of course that 'RR' Purdey that got some discussion here a while back looked like it mighta done some Pat Brady jeep duty back down the line, but then why not? I still think that the sentiment of Dale singing Happy Trails is about as fine as it gets, even if all the rest of it was pure glitz, Bullywood and bunk. I digress.
Herter's catalogues fueled a lot of mirth and provided a lot of decent stuff to the average guy at reasonable prices .. 'Chalice wads' were pretty darn good plastic wads, 'wasp wasted' varmint bullets sounded like a good idea and were not particularly any less accurate than many of the other bullets of the time shot from a Savage 340 in .222, a gun where field accuracy ALWAYS exceeded bench accuracy. I still catch fish on those spoons and use some bucktails tied with Herters dyed deer hair. Good days and fond memories when those catalogues were fresh. Thanks for the reminder, Dave.
