by Hap Rocketto
It may be a small footnote in shooting history, but it is my footnote. I took Art Jackson to his Camp Perry finale. After several years of cajoling I finally convinced Art that he should shoot the prone matches at Camp Perry in 2000 to celebrate the 60th anniversary of his storied, then record setting, 800X800 in the Dewar Team tryouts that year and the 25th anniversary of our first meeting. He agreed and what followed was a week in which I was awash in a flood of reminiscences about shooting history from the grand old man.
It seems that 2000 was also the year that the Olympics were to be held in Sydney. As Art participated in the last Australian Olympics in Melbourne in 1956, it seemed to me that it would be a neat trick of symmetry to hook him up with the US shooters who would be using Perry as part of their training. As luck would have it Perry was ripe with Olympians and medalists that year. In addition to Art there was his old team mate Art Cook, Jim Hill, and Lones Wigger, participated in they every Olympic games from 1948 through 1980-save 1976. Mike Anti, Tom Tamas, and Bruce Meredith were bound for Australia soon after Perry ended.
Tamas and I go back away. Tom was a high school senior shooting for the Springfield Armory Team and I was a first year shooter with the All Guard Squad back in 1983. It was Navy Cup Day with its typical wind, both real and imagined. Tom was up and popped off a very respectable 194 but with just a single X. I complimented him on the score and teased him about the solo center shot. After I blasted 20 record shots down range Tom passed me my scorecard so that I might sign it. He could barely contain himself as he counted up a score of 195 with just a single X and reminding me about sauce for the goose being sauce for the gander as he broke into a grin. In the long run we both had the last laugh. I ended up third over all and Tom’s score, which was eighth over all, got him high junior honors.
I brought Art over to the new Olympians with a brief introduction, not going into details, and Art, in his usual courtly and unassuming manner, wished them the best of luck, shook their hands, and took his leave. As I was turning to rejoin my old friend when Mike tapped me on the shoulder, thanked me for bringing the old gent over, and then asked me who he might be. He was a bit taken aback when I reeled of Art’s collection of world championships and records as well as his three Olympic appearances and bronze medal in 1952. His beau ideal was Wigger, who was still a pup when Art was king of the hill.
Later on that week I had occasion to show off to a junior shooter who was sharing my point and so I introduced him to Wigger. It was my turn to be taken aback when the kid later asked, “Hey, just who was that old dude you introduced me to after the meter match?” I took a few minutes to cover Wigger’s distinguished shooting career to the kid who simply had no sense of the sport’s history.
I was reminded of a similar incident that happened one of my favorite all time obscure baseball players, Morris “Moe” Berg. Berg was a journey man catcher for the old Brooklyn Dodgers, Washington Senators, Chicago White Sox, Cleveland Indians, and ended his career with the Boston Red Sox between 1923 and 1939. Moe was a bit of an unusual ball player for his time as he was a graduate of Princeton and later Columbia Law School with an interim stop for a year of language study at the Sorbonne. It was said of Moe that he could speak a dozen languages but couldn’t hit in any of them. He was the player for whom the expression, “Good field, no hit” was first used.
Berg served with the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency, during World War II. He gathered intelligence of all sorts across Europe about the Nazi Atomic Bomb program. He was able to, in the words of songster Chuck Brodsky, “speak physics without hardly a lisp.” After the war Moe, a mysterious loner, drifted about living off of the kindness of his friends, paying them back with his tremendous store of anecdotes and winning charm.
Moe preferred hanging around the older ball players as they were familiar to him and he disliked change. With his life time player’s pass and could occupy any unsold seat in any ball park free, and so he was often found there whiling away the time with keen observations about the game to any and all who might care to listen. One day Moe followed his friend Chicago baseball writer Jerome Holtzman to his hotel where he asked Moe of he would like to meet some of the young Cub players they had just encountered in the lobby. “Hell, no,” said Berg. “They think it all began with them.”
In a way that was the situation that Art and I faced. The youngsters of the sport are not aware, and it is not really their fault, of the many colorful and talented shooters that preceded them. It is up to us to keep the next generation up to speed on those that have made the sport what it is today.
When Sir Isaac Newton wrote, “If I have seen farther than others it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants” he just might have well been thinking about us preserving our shooting heritage by keeping the memory of the giants of the sport alive.
