Not all shooting need be down range…
By Hap Rocketto
Editor-in-Chief, pronematch.com
(a subsidiary of CPL Digby Hand Schützenverein International)
One of the biggest moments in, what is laughingly known as, my shooting career is the day I got to stand on the stage at Perry and receive the Rheinische-Westfalischen-Sprengstoff Challenge Trophy from the hands of Edie Reynolds, Chair of the NRA Smallbore Committee and fellow member of the Black Hawk Rifle Club. The RWS Trophy was originally awarded to the winner of an international postal match among the teams from the United States, Great Britain and Germany from 1933 to 1938. It takes its name from the donor, the noted German munitions manufacturer.
The international political situation of 1939 dictated a switch in match conditions, Germany and Great Britain were involved in a more serious shooting match and so the award of the trophy went through several iterations. Most recently, in 1998, is has been designated to be awarded to the winner of Intermediate Senior Outdoor Three Position Smallbore Rifle Champion at the National Rifle Association National Championships Camp Perry. I had been on the stage once before, but that was as the coach of the 1993 American Dewar Cup. This time I had earned the honor on my own, not as a hanger on to my better shooting National Guard team mates.
The amazing number of camera flashes going off made me think I was on the firing line during one of the legendary Camp Perry thunderstorms. After the formal part of the ceremony had ended I posed with a horde of relatives, team mates, well wishers, former champions, friends, Romans, and countrymen and, strange as it may seem, I swear a couple of the ubiquitous Japanese tourists who seem to be present in almost all group photos.
There was a lot of shooting going on, so to speak, and I realized that the shooting of pictures at shooting events is a very important yet neglected activity. I am a packrat so there are several albums sitting in my book case full of photographic memories of days, ranges, and rifleman long gone with whom I have had the pleasure to associate. A few black and white shots of my days as a high school rifleman start things.
A small snapshot of a young Captain Lones Wigger and me at Parks Range at Fort Benning in May of 1965 marks my best finish at the US International Championships. My folks let me travel by Greyhound bus, to Benning with my brother Steve as a high school graduation gift. I managed a solid finish shooting a straight stocked Winchester 52C, a cloth 10X jacket and DCM issue ammo. I was lucky at that match shooting a personal best, despite several cross fires on to Rhody Nornberg’s target, I squeaked out a 33rd place finish. Fortune smiled upon me for if there been another entry I would have been 34th.
One section of an album has a series of pictures I took of Perry during one of my first trips in the mid 1970s. There are views of the flag pole, the mess hall, the club house, and the railroad station. Thirty years later they now only exist in memory and on a few square inches of photographic paper. During the first flush of my shooting life those edifices identified the Perry of myth and memory and seemed to have existed since time immemorial. In my youth and naiveté there was no reason to think they would not always be there. Father Time and Mother Nature have changed both Perry and me, the buildings are gone and I while I am still here I am no longer the fuzzy cheeked youngster that took those photos.
There are a dozen or more pages of 8X10 images Connecticut National Guard Rifle Teams at Little Rock shooting the Wilson Matches and at Nashville competing, most successfully, in the Chief of The National Guard Smallbore Championships. There is a small color Polaroid print of a much younger me with a broad grin on my face as I hold up a cloth Distinguished Badge. Ed Biatowas had secretly given it to Bill Lange to present to me after I notched my last Leg and went out. It was a nice gesture from an established Distinguished Rifleman to a newcomer. Lange had been burdened with carrying it for a whole season before I happily relieved him of the obligation after the last Excellence In Competition match of the year.
There are pictures of various Dewar Teams for which I was called upon to be a line coach, pictures of matches at Camp Curtis Guild, Camp Underhill, Reading Rifle and Revolver Club, the range at Ramat Gan, Kitchner, Canada, the old Magnum range in the basement of an active chicken coop, and a lot of other places that I have shot. There is a favorite of The Old Man, my brother Steve, and me perched on the All Guard armorer’s van at Perry. The faces and places that stare out from my albums are now older and weathered and, in some sad cases, no longer with us. While the places and faces may be gone their memory lives on, stored carefully preserved on chemically coated paper.
If you are older it might be a good idea to sift through those shoe boxes of old photos you have, paste them in a book, and carefully label them with names, dates, and places before the memories fade. If you are young I admonish you to shoot as much with your camera as you do with your rifle. They will be well worth having to illustrate “The Good Old Days” when you spin tales to the new shooters you will bring into the game.
Hap,
As always, well said.
Ken Benyo