doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Grand American Handicap Winning Guns

Has any one assembled or does anyone know of a list of the guns used to win the Grand American Handicap each year. Seems easy to find information for the 1893 to 1902 GAH at live birds, but 1900 to 2012 for the GAH at targets not so much.

As you know, Sporting Life stopped reporting guns, powder & shells used in tournaments about 1902, so infro thereafter is mostly found in gun maker, DuPont, UMC & Peters ads.
Top Guns at the Traps (to about 1915)
http://docs.google.com/document/d/1D8QkBDo-KIQYk2G8lkE-kHLUybB5NJzBahX_eFKEyuY/preview
and at the bottom here
http://docs.google.com/document/d/1I_5GfGqfidbrfhpwzMvsccjDxjCd39M6nERp99wVEBQ/preview

You might contact Tami Daniel at the ATA HOF tdaniel@shootata.com

I have been fussing with such a list for, well, a long time. I'm working mostly from the 1920s timeframe forward. It is a bit tricky because there are a lot of instances where any old gun is put into a shooter's hands for a photo op, but it is not his winning gun. Doubles guns are hard to track down. It helps to have a bit of a running history on the individual shooters. Some of the legends (e.g. Mark Arie only used a Marlin) are false, so there's all of that to wade through.

When I attended the grand in 1969 and went to the old display room. I looked through the pictures of past winners. An informal count seemed to me to be evenly spilt between model 12's and Ithaca trap guns with the odd ljutic and others in the later years.
No perazzis until that year in fact the first one showed because my wife won the preliminary handicap. It caused a bit of a stir. Frank Little asked my wife if he could try it on a practce trap. He returned with a grin and remarked I am getting one of these! Ithaca was interested in it also as they hadn't received one yet and hers was marked Ithaca. I played dumb easy enough. The truth was it had been matterilis (sp) gun at the mexico city olympics . You know how it is when a guy needs a little play money, so it came home instead of going to Ithaca.

This identification of guns is a frustrating job. Just for fun, I went back to the 1918 average book and read the synopsis of the Grand for that year. I find that the winner of the GAH was John Henry and he shot an unusual gun, called the "Borrowed". No clue about any further information.

For 1918 it is one of the easy ones. John Henry won it with an Ithaca Flues SBT. It is in many of the Ithaca catalogues from at least 1925 to 1953 that he won with an Ithaca and it is stated in the 1925 Ithaca catalogue that it was borrowed. Ithaca SBTs won at least 11 times that I've found, 1917, 1918, 1925, 1926, 1929, 1932, 1934, 1937, 1939, 1942 and 1945.

Can add a few.

Shooters using LC Smith guns won the Grand American Handicap in 02', 06', 11', 19', 20', 27', 28', 33', and 35'.
G.W. Lorimer and W.E. Gordon took 1st and 2nd at the 1919 GAH.
Otto Newlin won the GAH in 1927, and Isaac Andrews won 1928.
Walter Beaver won the 1933 Grand American with a Specialty SBT.
Jordan Royall, using a Smith SBT, and Sam Vance with a DBT, were 1st and 2nd in the 1935 GAH.

Hall of Fame inductee Julius Petty, of Arkansas and his brother Paul
http://www.traphof.org/Inductees/Petty-Julius.html

Nice!! Both of them standing there with the actions of their guns closed!!

And Albert Ivins in 1920
http://www.traphof.org/People-Stories/albert-ivins-and-his-tomb-stone.html

Hmm. Of the many pictures I have seen of Julius Petty, that is the first one where he did not have a Model 12 in hand.