Archive for the ‘Ruark’ Category

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Bob and Jack and Julian and John.

Friday, September 6th, 2024

It was a busy weekend. There’s a new gun show near Leander that a bunch of us ended up going to, and I found quite a bit of stuff. Including .220 Swift and – believe it or not – .22 Remington Jet ammo.

Then I ate something that disagreed with me on Tuesday and haven’t been feeling great. Things are looking up, but all of this is to say that I’ve been behind the curve, so I’m only now getting to more gun book blogging.

I think I’m going to try to knock off the last five books that are down here on the kitchen table so I can move those upstairs. And bring some more down later, but don’t tell anybody I said that. This is going to be a long one, so I’m putting a jump here.

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Posted in Books, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia, Law, O'Connor, Ruark | No Comments »

“…he thought he was good.” (Random gun crankery.)

Thursday, August 29th, 2024

I have an impression that the Colt Woodsman looms large in American popular culture.

Chandler, in one of his stories (“Trouble Is My Business“), had two gunmen come through the door, one armed with “a Colt Woodsman with a long barrel and the front sight filed off. That meant he thought he was good.”

(Sorry. Just wanted to break the wall of text up a bit.)

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Posted in Books, Guns, Ruark | 3 Comments »

Gun Books ‘R Us.

Friday, June 7th, 2024

Seriously, I thought by now I’d have a clever intro for this. But I don’t. My Strategic Clever Reserves are exhausted. So why don’t we jump into this one? Warning: I think this is longer than usual…

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Posted in Books, Guns, History, Hoplobibilophilia, Ruark | 1 Comment »

Clippings.

Friday, August 25th, 2023

Two things that popped up in my reading that I thought were worth sharing.

1. CrimeReads has a fairly good piece by Keith Roysdon (generally one of their less pretentious writers): “To Film and Thrive in L.A.: Three Lesser-Praised Friedkin Films Are Classics“.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen “To Live and Die in L.A.” and I’d kind of like to see it again. My feelings about “Sorcerer” are well known. I’ve never seen “Cruising” but I do want to as part of my “watch all of Friedkin’s films” project.

2. “Facts of Life: For Outdoorsmen and Ordinary Gentlemen” by Richard (The Scout Rifle Study) Mann.

I think there’s some pretty sound advice here. You should interpret that as “it agrees with my prejudices”. For example:

17: The greatest outdoor book ever written was The Old Man and the Boy. It was published in 1957 and written by Robert Ruark. If it does not make you feel something you’re broken.

And:

10: Never confuse a politician with a patriot, they’re not the same thing. Patriots will risk their life for their country and folks they don’t know. Politicians risk the lives of those they don’t know and then tax them for the privilege.

Posted in Clippings, Movies, Ruark | Comments Closed

The Whipped Cream Difficulties Home for Unloved Firearms. (Random gun crankery)

Friday, January 6th, 2023

I like guns that have a story. Even if I don’t always know what that story is.

There are people who throw conniption fits when they see a vintage military gun that someone has modified. For me, it depends on two things:

  • How good the modifications are. There’s a reason people refer to “Bubba gunsmithing”.
  • The relative rarity of the gun. Someone who hacks on a vintage M1917 Enfield these days is doing something stupid and appalling. Someone who modified one of those guns back in the day when you could pull them out of barrels at the Army Surplus store and they were cheap enough to use as tomato stakes…that’s a different story.

I’ve written before about my fondness for esoteric small bore cartridges, like the .22 Jet and the .224 Harvey Kay-Chuk. This isn’t just limited to handguns, but extends to rifles as well. Indeed, I’ve been kind of looking for a good .22 Hornet. (CZ made nice ones for a while, but they seem hard to find now. The ideal would be a heavy-barrelled pre-64 Model 70, but those are not cheap.) I also wouldn’t mind finding a nice .22 Magnum rifle, to go with my two .22 Magnum revolvers, but those are more common and fairly easy to find.

Mike the Musicologist and I were out a few months ago and visited Provident Arms in Spicewood. This was on the used rack and, while it isn’t in .22 Hornet, it was nicely priced ($400 plus tax, out the door). I heard it softly calling my name, and well…it followed me home. In addition to the nice price, it opens up several new rabbit holes for me. And it feels like this gun does have a story, though I don’t know what that story is.

This is a custom gun. The base is a M1903A3 receiver. Some of the markings are obscured by the scope mount, but as best as I can figure out from what I can read, and this serial number table, it was made by Remington in 1942.

(This one says September 1943.) I’m pretty sure this is safe to shoot as it falls outside of the low serial number range, but I would welcome hearing from any 1903A3 experts out there. If you know anything about 1903A3 rifles, you know more than I do, and are thus an expert.

The scope is a Bushnell 3-14. It seems like a pretty good scope, though I won’t know for sure until I shoot the rifle. We’ll talk about that later. Assuming it holds zero and isn’t otherwise broken, I could probably take it off and get back at least $100 of the purchase price. But that would leave me with a gun with no sights, so why would I want to do that?

The other thing is, someone rechambered this in .220 Swift. No, really.

.220 Swift is one of those super-odd cartridges. Factory ammunition is “available”: Remington makes one loading, Federal makes one loading, and Winchester makes one. Good luck finding those in stock anywhere, though. Most folks seem to handload for .220 Swift.

And there are good reasons for that. You can really push .220 Swift, if you want. It uses a .224 diameter bullet, same as the .221 Fireball, .223/5.56, .22 Hornet, 5.7×28, and some other cartridges. I’ve seen claims that it is the fastest commercially produced rifle cartridge, and, based on skimming reloading data, that seems accurate. With lightweight bullets (35 grains or so) you can get over 4,000 feet per second out of the .220 Swift. That’s…astonishing. At that velocity, from what I’ve seen claimed, you can sight in 1.5″ high at 100 yards, and (depending on the the load) hold dead-on target out to 300 yards without the bullet being more than 1.5″ above or below your aim point. This would be a really great cartridge for varmint hunting.

But it is also a very controversial one. The sources I’ve read say that the factory ammo makers originally loaded it at the 4,000 fps level, but shooters found that it tore the crap out of barrels quickly, like within 500 rounds. The factories backed off their loads some in an attempt to improve barrel life. It’s also worth keeping in mind that the .220 Swift was introduced in 1935 (Winchester chambered it in the Model 54 at first, and then in the Model 70 when that was introduced the next year.) Since 1935, our knowledge of metallurgy and barrel-making has advanced considerably, and apparently newer barrels don’t get shot out as fast. Especially if you don’t feed them a high-volume of maximum loads in a short time: the consensus seems to be one or two shots on a varmint, then letting the gun cool down before taking more shots, is the way to go.

The other issue seems to be people trying to make .220 Swift do things it wasn’t designed to do, like take larger game. There was a guy in the 1940s who claimed it was the best cartridge he’d found for “feral burros”, while other people used it for deer, elk, and even tiger. On the other hand, if you’ve read Ruark’s Horn of the Hunter (and if you have, first drink’s on me next time we meet) the rifle he attempted to use to take a hyena (and threw away in disgust) was allegedly a .220 Swift. This may have been a bullet construction issue: fast moving hollow points would blow up on impact, while other bullet types (such as monolithic copper) give better penetration to vital areas.

Personally, I’d stick to game not much bigger than coyotes (Call me, Martha).

Of course, I’d welcome hearing from any .220 Swift experts out there. If you know anything about .220 Swift, you know more than I do, and are thus an expert.

I haven’t had a chance to shoot this yet. The temperatures are mild enough that I can finally go rifle shooting, but I need to find an outdoor range with open lanes. If I go to an indoor range, that makes it much harder to chronograph loads, and I do want to do some chrono work: not just with this gun, but with the Scout and the XP-100. And it seems like whenever I go indoor, there’s always someone there who has brought their .22 Eargesplitten Loudenboomer or something that produces an equal amount of concussion.

Mike the Musicologist, RoadRich, and I went shooting last Sunday at Lone Star. But the only range they had open without more of a wait than we wanted was the .22 rimfire range. That was fine, we brought .22s with us, but it did mean that I didn’t have a chance to check any of my other guns.

I actually do have ammo for this gun, oddly enough. I ordered some of the Remington load from Midway. Mike and I went down to Cabela’s the day after I bought the rifle: while they had no factory .220 Swift ammo, they did have two boxes of Hornady unfired .220 Swift cases, and RCBS loading dies for .220 Swift. Someone in my extended circle reloads, and did a batch of .220 Swift for me using those dies and cases. (As I recall, I bought 55 grain Hornady bullets for those loads.) I’ve also managed to accumulate some factory loaded ammo from various places (gun shows, gun shops, etc.).

This might turn into a fun project. It’s already been an interesting diversion.

And I’m still looking for a .22 Hornet. And a .22 Jet: I’m thinking a Jet might be my target of opportunity at the Symposium in June.

(This article from Outdoor Life was a useful source of background in writing this blog entry.)

Posted in Books, Guns, Ruark | 1 Comment »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 273

Tuesday, December 29th, 2020

105 years ago today, Robert Ruark was born.

I wrote a long appreciation of him on his 100th birthday, which I won’t repeat here. But I thought it might be neat to feature him in today’s block of videos.

Short: a 15 minute documentary about Ruark from the Robert Ruark Society.

Long: “Safari Hunting”, a 1954 documentary about an African safari, featuring Robert Ruark (and Harry Selby) and narrated by Ruark.

It’s kind of cool, for someone as Ruark obsessed as I am, to see and hear the man himself, instead of just reading him. It’s also kind of cool to see what a safari was like in the 1950s.

And speaking of that, one of my Christmas presents from my beloved and indulgent sister and her family was a swell book: White Hunters: The Golden Age of African Safaris by Brian Herne (affiliate link). I’m about 3/4ths of the way through it, and I feel comfortable in recommending this book.

Posted in Books, Guns, History, Ruark | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 158

Friday, September 4th, 2020

Another dose of random for today.

How could I not post this?

“The Poisonous History of Tomatoes”.

(Obligatory.)

Bonus, slightly longer, video, which you would not see on television today. Or any time after about 1965, I’d guess.

A 1950s episode of “Bold Journey” featuring the editor of True magazine, Douglas Kennedy. Mr. Kennedy goes to Africa…to hunt rhino.

This is within a few years of Ruark’s Horn of the Hunter: that was published in 1953, so I think (but can’t confirm) that Ruark’s safari was 1951 or 1952. According to the YouTube notes, this aired in the third season of “Bold Journey” which ran from 1956-1959.

Bonus #2: as a hattip to ASM826, I thought I’d post this one: “YOJIMBO & A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS – How The Western Was Changed Forever”.

Posted in Books, Food, Guns, History, Movies, Ruark | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 22, 2018.

Monday, January 22nd, 2018

Hemmingway and Ruark have a new hunting partner.

Harry Selby passed away on Saturday at the age of 92.

I’ve touched briefly on Selby in the past, but more in the context of Ruark. So please indulge me:

Mr. Selby was a postwar protégé of the East Africa hunter Philip Hope Percival, who took Theodore Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway on safaris, and he became a professional hunter himself in the late 1940s. He took the American author Robert Ruark on safari in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), and with the 1953 publication of Ruark’s best-selling book “Horn of the Hunter,” Mr. Selby became one of Africa’s most famous hunting guides.

…

Without cellphones or evacuation helicopters, Mr. Selby had to be the doctor, mechanic, chauffeur, gin-rummy-and-drinking partner and universal guide, knowledgeable about mountain ranges, grassy plains, rivers, jungles, hunting laws, migratory patterns, and the Bushmen, Masai, Samburu, Dinka and Zulu tribes. He spoke three dialects of Swahili. And he improvised; if there was no firewood, he burned wildebeest dung.
He was no Gregory Peck, but had an easygoing personality that made for good company in the bush. He coped with emergencies, pulling a client clear of a stampede or a vehicle from a bog, treating snakebites or tracking a wounded lion in a thicket — his most dangerous game. He was left-handed, but his favorite gun was a right-handed .416 Rigby, which can knock down an onrushing bull elephant or Cape buffalo in a thundering instant.

…

For 30 years, Mr. Selby ran company operations in Botswana, and guided hunters and photographers into leased concessions covering thousands of square miles in the Okavango Delta in the north and the vast Kalahari Desert in the south, home of the click-talking Bushmen. He cut tracks and built airfields in the wilderness.
In 1970, he established Botswana’s first lodge and camps for photographic safaris. He hired guides and a large support staff for what became a dominant safari business in Southern Africa. After Ker, Downey and Selby was bought by Safari South in 1978, he remained a director, and even after resigning in 1993 he continued to lead safaris privately until retiring in 2000.

Noted actor Bradford Dillman.

Mr. Dillman played prominent roles in “The Enforcer” and “Sudden Impact,” the third and fourth films in the “Dirty Harry” series, and won a Daytime Emmy Award in 1975 for his work on the TV series “The ABC Afternoon Playbreak.”

He was “Capt. McKay” in “The Enforcer” and “Captain Briggs” (not to be confused with Hal Holbrook’s “Lt. Briggs” in “Magnum Force”) in “Sudden Impact”. As we all know, Callahan went through captains like CNN goes through Russian conspiracy theories.

And finally, more of local interest: Hisako Tsuchiyama Roberts. Mrs. Roberts and her husband, Thurman, founded the Salt Lick barbecue restaurant in Driftwood, a little outside of Austin.

Tsuchiyama Roberts, who held a masters degree in psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles, dedicated her professional life in Texas to running the restaurant in the idyllic setting. She brought her flavors of her own culture to the smoked meat specialists, according to her son, Scott Roberts, who in his 2014 book “Salt Lick Cookbook: A Story of Land, Family, and Love,” wrote about his mother’s tempura frying of vegetables and shrimp for the menu along with her addition of poppy seeds to cole slaw and celery seeds to potato salad.

…

…with her passing, family shared a tale of the diminutive Tsuchiyama Roberts felling a charging buck with the swing of a pecan bucket she was using for shelling and killing it with a rock while her husband and his friends were away on an unsuccessful hunting trip.

She was 104.

Posted in Beef, Books, Food, Guns, Movies, Obits, Ruark | Comments Closed

Late night thoughts.

Wednesday, August 16th, 2017

I was talking with a friend a couple of weeks ago, and she said something that triggered a mental connection. And then some other stuff happened that triggered some more connections. This is another one of these posts where I was thinking out loud when I wrote this, please forgive me if it goes astray.

I didn’t live back in the old days – 30s – 60s – but my impression (based on what I’ve read) is that, as a child, you were valued somewhat based on physical skills. That is, you were expected to be able to run, hit, and catch reasonably well. (Ruark talks about this a little in The Old Man and the Boy.) If you couldn’t, you were looked down upon by your peers. If you were actually physically incapable (lost a leg or an arm) you may have been looked upon with some pity rather than condescension, but there was still a feeling that the non-physically skilled were somehow inferior. It seems like that lasted well into the 1970s and possibly even into the late 80s.

(Question: what were the expectations for girls? I don’t have a good answer, not ever having been a girl.)

At some point, this changed. Physical skill, while still valued, began to be supplanted by other skills, specifically video games. If you couldn’t run, hit, or field well, being good at rescuing the princess from another castle or whatever the frack Sonic did could still gain you some level of respect. I don’t know exactly when this change started: I feel like it was after I went off to college, but before things changed again.

I still see parents getting their kids into sports, but soccer seems to be the thing now. And that seems to me to be less about the sport – there’s not that much talent required, just run and kick ball – and more about tiring the little s–ts out for a while so Mommy and Daddy can get stuff done. (There are other exceptions, such as Little League and youth football, but I have the impression that those sports are driven by parental nostalgia. “I loved Little League when I was a kid! Surely my kid will love it, too!”)

The third change was the growth of the Internet. Once that became commonplace and everywhere, it didn’t matter if you could run, hit, field, or what you were good at. If you had some kind of specific area of interest – something you were good at, something you were obsessed with – the Internet enabled you to find people just like you. Nobody knew you were a dog, or an awkward teenage boy. We accept you, one of us, one of us.

I used to think that was a good thing. I still do: I think it’s great that those awkward teenagers can find people who are just like them. I think the Internet has done a wonderful job helping people who are shut-in or disabled or just socially awkward interact with others. I think it’s incredibly empowering, and a good antidote to bullying and ostracism.

But recent events have me wondering: have we also built a bunch of individual echo chambers? Now that everyone can find people just like them, have we devalued social interaction and the ability to get along with other, different people? Are we raising generations of otaku?

I don’t want to seem like a cranky old man longing for a return to the good old days. There were bullies and thugs and cheaters and generally not nice people back then, there are now, and there always will be. “There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation.”

But could this be part of the reason why we have LARP Nazis?

Posted in Geek, History, Nazis, Ruark | Comments Closed

Random notes: June 24, 2016.

Friday, June 24th, 2016

The Baltimore Sun recalls a time when terrapin was “the signature delicacy of Maryland cuisine”.

(Linked here because: my favorite chapter in The Old Man and the Boy is towards the end, where the Old Man takes The Boy up to his friend’s in Maryland. They stop off along the way and have a proper meal of canvasback duck, terrapin stew, and various kinds of “iced tea” – this being at the height of Prohibition. So, yeah, I have a vague desire to try terrapin stew sometime.)

I intended to link this earlier in the week, but forgot until the On Taking Pictures podcast reminded me: 20×24 Studio is closing down “by the end of next year”.

The significance of this is that 20×24 is the home of the largest Polaroid camera ever made:

The camera, the 20-inch-by-24-inch Polaroid, was born as a kind of industrial stunt. Five of the wooden behemoths, weighing more than 200 pounds each and sitting atop a quartet of gurney wheels, were made in the late 1970s at the request of Edwin H. Land, the company’s founder, to demonstrate the quality of his large-format film. But the cameras found their true home in the art world, taken up by painters like Chuck Close and Robert Rauschenberg and photographers like William Wegman, David Levinthal and Mary Ellen Mark to make instant images that had the size and presence of sculpture.

But Polaroid no longer produces instant film: the company bought “hundreds of cases” of the 20×24 film, and hoped to reverse engineer it:

“I’ve been doing this for 40 years now, and I understand the importance of the history maybe better than anyone else,” said Mr. Reuter, who is also a photographer and filmmaker. “But there is a time when things have to come to an end. These are not materials that were designed to last indefinitely, and the investment to keep making them would be huge, multimillions.”

20×24 Studio.

Pavel Dmitrichenko is hoping to rebuild his ballet career, after being out of the dance scene for about two and a half years.

Why was he out? Injury? No, actually, he was in prison.

And why was he in prison? He was convicted of plotting the acid attack against Bolshoi Ballet director Sergei Filin.

Mr. Dmitrichenko now labels the whole affair pure fiction. It was all a plot, he said, by Mr. Filin and his allies in the Bolshoi to remove him from the scene because he was vocal about their corrupt practices and would not be intimidated.
The revisions spill out in dizzying, not to say implausible, succession: He never spoke to Mr. Zarutsky about Mr. Filin. He denied that he admitted as much in court. Ms. Vorontsova was not his girlfriend. He even raises doubts that there was any acid attack since Mr. Filin has little noticeable scaring and can drive, despite the seeming lack of an iris in one eye that he keeps hidden behind sunglasses.

Posted in Books, Food, History, Photography, Ruark | Comments Closed

100 years ago today…

Tuesday, December 29th, 2015

…on December 29, 1915, Robert Chester Ruark, Jr. was born.

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Christmas thoughts.

Wednesday, December 24th, 2014

Before I went to sleep last night, I spent some time with an old friend: Robert Ruark.

He wrote memorably and well about Christmas. I like something he said, in one of the “Old Man and the Boy” essays, about the smell of Christmas:

The old-fashioned Christmas smell was predominantly that of crushed evergreens against the constant resiny scent of a snapping fire. One was a cool, smell, the other hot, but both joined forces in delightful companionship. This aromatic back drop was overlaid by the heady odors that drifted from the kitchen, the sage which went into the turkey stuffing predominating.
The whole was tinctured with spices and by alcohol, because brandies and wines were lavishly used in the preparation of sauces and in building the fruit cakes. There was, as well, an infusion of tropical scent, as the infrequent Christmas citrus fruits the opulent golden oranges added an oily sharpness to the mixture. This was counterbalanced by the clean, cidery bite of the hard, white-fleshed, scarlet apples. Bright Christmas candies the clover-shaped and heart-shaped sugary ones you never saw at any other time of the year and the striped hard ones with the soft centers helped the greasy Brazil nuts along, as did the winy aroma of the great clusters of raisins, sugary-sticky to the touch. The spices that went into the eggnog or the hot Tom and Jerrys stood off the warm friendship of the rum that gave character to the cream.

It’s almost like being there. Ruark had been dead for several years when I was a boy, but I remember similar Christmas smells; maybe not as many, or as strong, but I do remember them from my childhood. I never really got the taste for raisins, but we always had the Christmas Hershey’s Kisses; somehow, I remember them tasting better than they do now.

These days, people buy chemicals in a bottle and call that the smell of Christmas.

Maybe it isn’t all bad: today, the Old Man probably would have lived another ten or twenty years. I wonder if the Old Man would have thought it was worth the trade, though.

(The quote above is from a not-terribly-well OCRed version of The Old Man’s Boy Grows Older at archive.org. Here’s another one for you, if you’ll hold still for it, though it doesn’t have much to do with Christmas:

Perhaps I am not very clear here, but what I am getting at is that my teen-age group possessed, legally, all the death-dealing, injury-wielding weapons that are now owned clandestinely by the “bad” kids. There was a certain pride in being trusted. My cousins and friends and I used to go off on a Saturday picnic into the local wilds with enough armament to conquer the county rifles, shotguns, knives, scout axes and were not regarded as a serious menace to the community. Or to each other.

)

Posted in Books, Christmas, Guns, Ruark | Comments Closed

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