doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com For Ithaca Gun Fans

Walt, a shooting buddy is quite proud of his 32" double trigger 5E with all options. When he first showed it to me, I pointed out the R and L on the tang. I am not familiar with the Ithaca selective trigger, so I just assumed it was a Miller. It is a very clean conversion to double triggers and works well.

Looking at a similar order to Boa dated 8/7/31 some of the 1930 guns re-appear. Noted is the 4E single with the compensator. Several of the guns on the page were marked "returned" confirming these were consignment guns for the GAH. There were also 2 Flues singles listed, one sold the other returned.

under the heading of "you live and learn" how many of us would have looked at an Ithaca single with a cutts and said, "i wonder if that was factory". most collectors i know would have just murmured and moved on. tmc

Walt, I see two guns marked VICTORY, what grade is that?

What a nice window to history.

I find it interesting is that a quick scan of the list shows, what, a 450-gun range for the SBTs? That kind of volume would have been more appropriate for the early 1920s when the Knick was selling like hotcakes. My take is that Ithaca, like some of the other companies, was beginning to see a lot of their production backing up at the shipping dock. And as Walt points out, some of the guns were just round-tripping back and forth from the factory to the retailers.

As regards the Grand, its attendance had peaked in 1929, just months before the market crash, and thereafter showed a steady decline for the next 5-6 years. By the mid-1930s the Grand was only pulling about half the shooters it did in 1929. I have to presume that a drop in gun sales would preceed an actual drop in shooting.

When Parker Brothers was sold to Remington, many entries in the order book of the period were dedicated to guns being returned for credit from dealers that had them on consignment for years. Some guns went back and forth more than once or twice. I guess the same thing happened at Ithaca.

I just finished looking page by page through the 1932 jobbers book. The number of high grade guns were noticeable fewer. They introduced the 'Sunburst recoil pad' that year and sold a ton of them. Also the first year for the Mag. 10 double and a few dozen were sold, about 1/2 of them being higher grades. The depression was taking its toll. The 1930 book lists a lot of trap configured doubles, more in 1931. It suggests to me that some of the trap shooters were still using double guns.

Gotta' love them double guns. Ned Lilly won the doubles title at the Grand in '62 with his Smith, and ultra-hotshot John Sternberger was using an M21 at that same time. That was well into the O/U era.

I have one of the guns on this list. It's a Sousa grade serial no. 402156, single barrel trap. I'll be happy to share pictures but I don't have a web page to post them to. If anyone wants to post them for me, I can e-mail them.