New Shooter Coming Out…
By Hap Rocketto
The Old Man was a great many things besides being an amazingly tolerant and understanding father. Most of all he was a raconteur, whose tales could sometimes reach Munchhausen proportions, yet were always just believable enough to make them seem realistic. His ongoing battle with the seemingly balky mechanism of his High Standard Model 102 , and the resultant convoluted reasoning and attendant tales that accompanied the malfunctions, gave him a great deal of opportunity to exercise his skill at suspending belief. His many tales of woe gave cause for his team mates on the Nutmeg Pistol Club to nickname him “Alibi Abe.” As he liked to put it, “They are my memories, not yours, and therefore I will not try to clear away the cloud of confusion that surrounds your inaccurate recollections with the truth as I see it.”
Until the fog of age caught up with them both he, and his old crony and fellow pistol shooter John Lucas, ran a series of 2700 three gun matches at the club for many years. The Old Man did the organization and paper work. John called the matches and both of them spent many long hours together in prepping the range and swapping lies. John was a retired Navy enlisted man who had signed on for his first hitch so long ago that he took his recruit training on the old wooden hulled USS Constellation when it was the station ship at the Newport Naval Training Station. He started his road to retirement working on Irish linen covered biplanes and collected a 14 karat gold Navy Distinguished Pistol Shot Badge and a seabag stuffed so full of yarns that he presented a constant challenge to the Old Man’s store of stories.
In his youth the Old Man had, for reasons unsaid, run away from home in the midst of the Great Depression. He left a home somewhat insulated from the economic troubles of the time to hobo about the country. If he were to be believed, and who was I to doubt him, he had ridden freight trains, lived in Hoovervilles, worked in a carnival, ridden into New Orleans at Mardi Gras atop a truck load of green bananas, been a swamper in a lumber camp, and done most everything imaginable except play the piano in a bordello-which is not an Italian dessert. Perhaps his memories became tangled with his imagination but, as he so often reminded us, they were his memories.
He liked to gamble. The Old Man didn’t like the horses because he knew the jockeys were in cahoots with each other to fix the races. He didn’t play cards much as he was never sure about the honesty of the dealers. He liked a game that he could control. He, and I kid you not, liked Craps. The galloping dominos fascinated him. The man had a doctorate in this rather arcane area. He knew dice probability cold and could add up the pips before the cubes stopped bouncing. His concentration at these times was intense. My long suffering mother once told the story of a neighborhood block party where he was huddled in the garage with a few of the husbands and layabouts who populated our street around an old Army blanket tossing dice. The shooter blew on the dice and as he was yelling out something like, “Baby needs a new pair of shoes” his upper denture fell out of his mouth onto the blanket. Not missing a beat the Old Man stuck his fingers in to his mouth, pulled out his, slapped it down on top of the one that had fallen, and lisped out, “Toss them bones, your faded!”
After he was widowed my brother Steve and I would often take the Old Man with us to matches. He enjoyed it because our shooting crowd lavished an affectionate attention on him and, more importantly, we picked up all the expenses. It was not that he was tightfisted; he just liked the sign of respect. As a matter of fact to show he was generous he always made it a point to tell us, “Leave big tip, I don’t want anyone to think I am cheap.” It was on one of these occasions that his addiction to the dice slipped out in a most unusual way.
Watching me get ready to shoot a 300 rapid stage he, in fatherly enthusiasm, hollered out the Craps term for the initial roll of the dice before a ‘point’ is established, “New shooter coming out!” when my relay was called to the line. My brother was cringed at the break in decorum but had to admire the Old Man’s sense of humor which brought out this double entendre inside joke.
When the targets came up I went down. Somehow I had loaded my eight round magazine first. After the first two shots I instinctively pulled the magazine out, stripping two rounds out onto my mat, I then inserted the two round magazine, let the bolt free and jammed the top round with the one still in the chamber from the first magazine. The jam had to be cleared because it was not an alibi situation. Now there were three loose rounds rolling around on the mat and my scorer was in stitches with laughter. The bolt was closed and the magazine was smacked in and two more rounds were launched down range. Still another magazine change followed and four more 168s headed toward the target. I then scrambled to pick up the three loose rounds, loaded each one singly, and shot them. As I recovered from the recoil of the last shot I saw the targets go down, pulled the magazine, and switched on the safety. That seemed to be about the only thing that went right that string.
When the targets came up for scoring there were, much to the amazement of all, ten widely spread, but more or less centered, spotters. The chalk board read 98-2X. The second string went much more smoothly. When I cleared the line The Old Man was there to greet me. “Son”, I have never ever in my life seen anybody as busy for 60 seconds as you were just then.” Then, reverting to true gambler’s form, he commented, “A good score, but the boys at the Crap table would say that you were trying to make your points the hard way.”
