by Hap Rocketto
With the 2012 National Smallbore Position Outdoor Championship coming to its end I had come to a fork in the road of my shooting career.
I had just won the geezer Three Position Championship the first time I was eligible to compete. Did I go out in a blaze of glory as the national Senior Champion or try to better the legendary Fred Cole’s record number of senior titles?
While not a believer in omens several things happened to help me make up my mind.
The first occurred as I was settling in for my last string of kneeling in the team match, perhaps the last 20 shots I would ever fire in position at Perry. My right shooting boot felt loose. Not wanting to get up and reset my position, a summer of shooting kneeling and 65 years of avoiding exercise was taking its toll, I went ahead and shot. My last bull was a 50X50 and my last shot was an X. As I struggled to my feet I looked down at my boot and saw that I was much like Pap, Huckleberry Finn’s father, whose boot had, “… a couple of toes leaking out of the front end of it.”
In spite of the wardrobe malfunction the Digby Hand “Young At Heart” Team of Len Remaly, Ernie Mellor, Tom McGurl, me, and Coach/Captian Charlie Adams-all of us card carrying members of Medicare-had just established two new senior National Records in four man three position competition.
After the omen in kneeling I brought my position rifle to 10 Ring Service for its annual physical. When I arrived to pick it up two days later it was still in pieces on the bench. Thinking this could not be good I soon found out I was right. Lisa Lovelace, who has succeeded her late father Steve Moore as president of 10 Ring, told me the rifle itself was in great shape. However, she pointed to the stock where a longitudinal crack in the rifle’s bedding extended into the wood. Thinking I might get an aluminum replacement I soon found that no one on Commercial Row had one in stock.
Things started to add up, a national individual title, a final bull that was perfect, boots that had disintegrated in the last match, two team National Records, and a broken stock with no replacement readily available.
My mind drifted back a half of a century to my freshman year in high school and Miss Moore’s English class. We had studied Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and across the years I dimly recalled a passage concerning augury: “Plucking the entrails of the offering forth, They could not find a heart within the beast.” Caesar did not heed the warning of the soothsayers and we all know how he ended up.
A day or so later I ran into Bill Wolfe, an icon in New York State smallbore shooting, who lives, serendipitously enough, on Winchester Avenue. I have known Bill since the mid 1960s when we both ran summer camp rifle ranges at opposite ends of Gardner’s Lake in Salem, Connecticut. Bill worked at private establishment while I was on the staff of Camp Wakenah, a Boy Scout facility.
Several times each year we had a rifle match between the camps after which we would share a meal in the host camp’s dining hall. Bill’s kids inevitably won. His campers were long term, four to eight weeks, while mine were usually staying for just a week. Shooting is not a skill one picks up quickly and easily in just five days, no matter what United States folklore would have you believe, but the kids had fun and a change of diet.
Attired in his usual Camp Perry garb, dark slacks and a white Hawaiian style shirt which hung outside of his trousers and was stretched snugly across his retired gentleman’s pot belly, Bill stopped me outside of Hough Auditorium. Leaning heavily on his walking stick he offered a congratulatory handshake and then fumbled with a pack of cigarettes and lighter.
Simultaneously striking up both a conversation and his smoke he absentmindedly scattered cigarette ash over our shirt fronts as he told me he couldn’t wait to get home and tell Fred Cole I had won the senior title.
I was flattered. As mentioned earlier Frederick W. Cole Jr., “Old King Cole,” is a legend in the smallbore community. He was named a rifle All American at Columbia University the year I was born and has been beating me pretty regularly ever since.
Bill quickly came to the point of the needling. In his gravelly Yonkers accented smoker roughened voice he growled, “Ya know what Fred is gunna say when he hears ya won?
“No.” said I.
Hacking out plume of smoke he rasped, “Freddy’s gunna tell me to tell you not to get too comfortable. He says he is coming back next year and wants point 90, the same as his age.”
I know Fred Cole, I am friendly with Fred Cole, but I am no Fred Cole and could never match his legendary run of senior victories.
Bill’s comment, seemingly inconsequential, tipped the scales.
“Bill, I replied, “Fred spent his career teaching English and he will know what I mean when you tell him that I reject T.S. Eliot’s Hollow Men. I am going out with a bang, not a whimper. You are the first to know that I am now officially retired from position competition at Perry.”
Shooting with Hap at CP 3P was a true adventure and delight. There was a moment at supper one night when Hap looked a bit anxious as he messaged his trigger finger and commented that it was “locked up!” A true geriatric moment as our old bones don’t always behave predictably, and all shooters would know that a good trigger finger is highly desirable. The moment passed and Hap went on to bring his old bones and old gear to the firing line on team day where he did himself, and his teammates, proud. Great fun and happy memories.