doublegunshop.com - home Forums Thread Like Summary - Reflections of my past

This is part of a PM I sent to a board member. It was written while I was thinking about my youth, first guns and memories. One thought lead to another, but I think everyone here has like memories. Some far away, in the deepest part of our minds and some much closer, all near to our hearts when we bring them up. The past holds things more valuable than gold, but only if we recall them and more so if we share a few of them with family and friends. I have no gun too valuable that it can not be used and shared and most of my memories as well are better shared.

"I'd give a month off my lifespan just to hunt with either of my grad fathers, one more time, or watch my uncle shoot quail with his little Crescent .410. He was the most deadly shot I ever saw on quail. Two birds, every cover rise and 90% would be cock birds. It took me decades to distinguish the males on the flush like he did. Later in life he was crippled by a mild case of Polio from childhood and arthritis so badly he struggled with just getting around. But at 30 he was smooth to watch shoot those quail."

I had a Chesapeake female dog, AKA a B-itch, who was called Sir. Meanest and toughest dog I ever had, she would eat ice to get to a bird and never lost a fight with another dog. My first, constant companion. She was followed by seven others, current one Shiloh. A black lab who retrieves birds with joy and thinks game limits are insane. A dog after my heart.

I have given everyone of my kids their first gun and tried to set them up with memoirs and stories of my memories from my youth. I hope I have not failed. If you have kids or friends please do the same. I still recall the smell of pipe smoke, from a grand father dead 50 years and enjoy the sweetness of it to this day. He always brought it into the blind and puffed away at it as we sat there. I wonder if he was thinking about his father and grandfather as well. I will soon be able to ask him I suspect.

Please share and enjoy, for the season all too soon will be closed to us all. Give a young, or new shooter a chance to shoot one of your finer guns, with the hopes it leads to fine memories for him or her. Guns are meant to be used and shared. Tomorrow, I am going to shoot one of my cripple guns and am sure everyone who sees it will hold it and hear the story about why we have cripple guns. Any who ask will be encouraged to shoot it a couple times, just to have the chance. For those who don't know, a cripple guns is what some call a crossover gun. Just to be totally different, I am going to shoot my right shoulder-left eye cripple gun first round and my left shoulder-right eye second. No straights tomorrow for me, just a memory.

My sons keep on leaning on me to put things and events in my life down on paper or should I say hard copy. I just have this feeling that if I do it is sort of the end, though I will say I was lucky enough to be over time to be in the right place at the right time. I did know the Beatles and the rest of the Brit 1960s Liverpool groups because they all needed Amplifier repairs, did try my best to date the Cavern cloak room girl Pricilla White as she was then. Your Jimmy Hendrix gave me a Silver Dollar as a tip for a fast guitar effects pedal repair.



I am the one on the right that looks like a rabbit caught in the vehicle headlights.
Was in Berlin when the East German people flooded checkpoint Charlie and climbed over the wall, I have a few pieces of wall for the memories of being kissed by so many women in my life but I have not told my wife about that part of the event.

Having thought about the first part of my post one further memory came into focus about those times. While I was living the music a lot of the young men on your side of the pond where being drafted to Vietnam, for what it is worth that did not go unnoticed amongst my circle of friends on this side of the pond and we all without exception realised it was very close to being us going there but fate dealt a different hand. There is nothing more I want to say about that grief ridden episode.

While not ready to crawl out on a ice floe, I, too, have started the Last Unwind. My shooting partner and I have been tight lipped about where we find woodcock on public lands, and while we hoped to have more seasons, we realize that our run is closer to the ending than it is to the beginning. We have slowly introduced younger others to some of these spots and what to look for when chasing woodcock. Never the popular sport here it is in the NE, with the decline of wild quail on most places in their former domain, we started in earnest 15 years ago in specializing our efforts on them and have been well rewarded. I've introduced a handful of younger men on the where's and how's of wild turkey hunting in this area on public land. Our children have no interest in hunting, so I began last spring cutting loose the bulk of my guns either through sale or outright gifts. One of my late friend's sons has developed a love of turkey hunting as a result of sharing information and guns. While not the age of when the late King Brown re-dogged in his 80s when he got a lab pup, I picked up my third bird dog, a French Brittany puppy last spring. It will be a race to our statistically predicted mortalities and I have ambivalent feelings of whom I want to go first. Gil

Though we obviously have no relation by blood, we have a kinship that far surpasses that. We are truly brothers in thought, and in what we place importance upon..

Great post.

when you strip away all the tinsel....about all we really have is our relationships and our stories - capitalize on those things - they are your ultimate treasures.

best regards,

tom

Battle, the way I describe it is the males are just blacker and whiter in the heads. You train your eyes to pickup the darkest heads first. Most of the times they will be males. We never shot a covey out. If a covey got down to five or six birds we would give them a couple weeks rest. Sometimes they would merge with another small covey and be large enough to shoot again. Point is we wanted to leave enough birds behind so they could nest again next year. Our farm held ten to eleven coveys every year. And we could take off hunting in any direction for several miles and find birds. When I was 12 I could put you on more than forty coveys within a two mile radius of our farm and do it again at both my grand fathers farms which were several miles away. My uncle knew everybody in the county and I exect he knew where hundreds of coveys were in those days. Last time I checked there were four coveys in the same area and two of those coveys are hit or miss most years. Gone are the weed fields, the fallow fields, the hay fields, the hedge rows, the truck crops and the cover for birds. Plus nobody would reduce nest robbers like we did in those days. Feral cats, dogs, coons and foxes were given a very hard and short life.

Nine out of ten posters, on this board, are on the better side of 60. Time is limited and we should spread the joy to others, friend, family and strangers. Take an extra box of shells for your double, in case a fellow shows interest in your gun. Give him a box and shoot your gun with him. Shooting side by sides takes a bit of coaching at first, but different experiences are fun for new shooters. I have done this and seen that same fellow bring out a family double the next week to try. It helps a lot if you explain Wally World heavy loads are not the best choice for doubles. I do the same for pump guns, which are a fading glory these days.

I have never liked being photographed and have almost no pictures of my childhood or even the past fifty plus years. Those of you who post photos are blessed with things to share with family and friends going forwards. But I have memories and when quiet times occur in the blind I share them with family. Memories are what we will all be someday, so pass them on or they will be no more when we are no more.

I dragged my 90 year old father out Dove hunting and gave him a Fox 16 A grade to shoot. By 90, dad was down to one good eye, lost forty pounds from his peak and did not want to embarrass himself. So he sat there and watched the birds fly for about half an hour. Then got up and placed four cut weeds around his seat for distance markers. Sat back down and started shooting singles and a double. Most were one shot kills. In under a box he had his limit of 15 birds. Then he sat there and watched as my Lab, who is now departed the world, went out and retrieved every bird. The dog saved him walking, but I'd bet money he could find each bird himself without any problem. We always shot birds and retrieved them later. It made us mark them well and not sky bust. Both my middle son and youngest sons were with me that day and that is their lifetime memory of their grand father hunting. That was the last time my father held a gun. After that I could not get him to hunt or even shoot a round of Skeet. He was just done shooting and I think satisfied. I would be.

I still have two shells he had left over from that box and they are in a lock box, my after I am dead lock box, with a note to give one to each of my sons who were there that day. Black Remington Game shells, 16 ga, 7 1/2's, ounce, are nothing special but everything special at the same time. I'd like to know which of the boys decides he has to own the Fox. It sits on the rack behind me. There is going to be a lot of horse trading for guns after I am gone. Who gets which 42, who gets that Fox, who gets the Ruger 28, who gets the Ithaca 37 28, who gets my Model 12 28 ga., who gets my uncles .410 Crescent and so on. In that lock box is a index card for each gun I own, with basic stuff like when bought, cost, any special things I did with it, if I liked it a lot and why. One of my 3200's has a card for the last .410 100 straight I shot, because I do not think I will shoot anymore. Write it down if you have not told them about things. They want to know, or might one day.