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by Hap Rocketto

While leafing through an old Sports Illustrated magazine, as I waited for Dr. Ron Serra, my optometrist, to call me in for my annual pre-outdoor shooting season checkup. my eye caught an article celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the Designated Hitter by Steve Rushin. The minutia and out of the ordinary things that happen on the diamond are what makes baseball particularly interesting to me.

As an expatriate from Brooklyn the Dodgers were my team, until they tried to trade Jackie Robinson to the despised Giants and then, like the Arabs in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s verse “The Day is Done,” folded their tents and silently stole away.

The next abomination was Astroturf and then the designated hitter. Even though I am an American League team fan I find myself in agreement with the classic baseball film Bull Durham’s hero Crash Davis who felt that there should be a Constitutional amendment outlawing both.

History was made on a damp chill Opening Day at Fenway Park in 1973. An ailing Ron Blomberg, of the button down soulless corporate New York Yankees, stepped to the plate to face Luis Tiant in the first inning. Blomberg had been penciled in as the designated hitter by Yankee Manager Ralph Houk to protect the left handed slugger’s tender hamstrings. It was the first time such a position had ever been fielded and either Blomberg, or the Red Sox’s Orlando Cepeda, was going to become a historical footnote that day. Both would eventually find a niche in the Baseball Hall of Fame, Blomberg’s bat resides there while Cepeda’s visage adorns a bronze plaque indicating his place amongst the immortals.

Blomberg got to the plate first assuring his place in baseball trivia. With the bases loaded the first designated hitter in history was ignominiously walked by El Tiante, forcing in Matty Alou who was dancing about at third base. In the end the walk and the run mattered not as the Yankees lost 15-5.

He would spend most of the rest of his career as a DH, Designated Hebrew as the proudly Jewish Blomberg often noted. He hardly ever donned a mitt and headed to the field. If he wasn’t at the plate hitting he was in the dugout sitting, “riding the pine” in baseball parlance.

Ironically the first DH appeared at Fenway Park, the home of Ted Williams, who once said, “When I walk down the street and meet people, I just want them to think ‘There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.” Rushin closed his article with a nice play on Williams’ comment, noting that, as Blomberg strode away from the interview,”…everyone within eyeshot is thinking the same thing: There goes the greatest sitter who ever lived.”

While Blomberg was the first, the greatest DH is probably Edgar Martinez, late of the Seattle Mariners. In his career Martinez was an All Star seven times, won five silver slugger awards and was twice the American League batting champion. Martinez’s only completion is Red Sox DH David Ortiz, an active player, who, also started with Seattle.

I identify with Blomberg as a great sitter. We are both Jewish and both journeymen at our sports. My claim is based upon the fact that I hold four National Rifle Association records in the sitting position, Open and Senior 20 shots any sights and Senior metallic sights at 50 yards indoors as well the senior 50 foot record.

However, the Edgar Martinez of shooting sitting is Edmund Jensen. Ed was a full timer with the “Happy Hooligans,” North Dakota Air National Guard’s 119th Fighter Group. He was Distinguished with both service and smallbore rifle and he liked to do two things, shoot and fly fixed wing aircraft

One cold March day in North Dakota, as if there could ever be another kind of March day in North Dakota, Ed stood up after shooting a 200X200 in the 1972 NRA Conventional Four Position Sectional. As he prepared for kneeling Ed took a peek at the posted National Record sheet which noted that, in April of 1959, a junior rifleman named H.M. Malick, Jr., of Washington, Pennsylvania set the National Sitting Record with a 200X200 with an additional 350 Xs.

One of our team mates was Dean Oakes who, like Malick, hailed from Washington, Pennsylvania. Oakes, a helicopter pilot who, like many of his ilk, suffers from an inferiority complex involving the revolving wings of his aircraft. Dean’s soto voce needling, an All Guard tradition, about the superiority of both rotary winged aircraft and junior shooters from Washington, Pennsylvania immediately drew Ed’s attention.

Ed directed a Cheshire cat grin toward Dean and ambled on over to the stat office. Picking up the gauntlet that Oakes had tossed down he announced that he would like to take a run at the sitting record. To that end, when the day’s shooting had concluded, Ed returned to the line with a stack of A-17 targets and a brick of Eley Tenex.

He folded himself into sitting and proceeded to shoot at a regular cadence, only interrupted by the whirring sound of the pulleys as he changed targets. He had been shooting quite awhile when the range crew pleaded with him to take a break and return the next day, after all, it had been a long day for all concerned. Ed genially agreed. The next day he picked up where he left off and rattled off ten after ten after ten after ten until he had accumulated a stack of 50 perfect sitting targets.

His record of 200X200, with an additional 500 tens, stands to this day. He stopped, he said, because he figured no one else would be crazy enough to try to beat him. Jensen, not Blomberg, is the greatest sitter who ever lived and he was right.

by Hap Rocketto

While researching an article on the Herrick Trophy I ran across an old photo taken at the National Matches featuring ‘Kernel Mumm’s Amateurs.’ LTC Morton C. Mumma, the National Match Executive Officer, had organized a pick-up team of some of the most prominent shooters of the day, the likes of Frank Kahrs, Grosvenor Watkyns, and, mostly through nepotism rather than skill, Midshipman Morton C. Mumma, Jr.

The Mumma family has a long history of competitive shooting starting with Morton Claire Mumma, West Point class of 1900, who was the first of the line of Distinguished Mumma marksmen. The first Mumma went Distinguished in 1904 with the rifle and with the pistol in 1909. During the Great War the colonel was commandant of the Small Arms Firing School at Camp Perry and, later, Executive Officer of many National Matches.

Morton C. Mumma, Junior, United States Naval Academy Class of 1925, earned Distinguished with the rifle in 1927. At the outbreak of World War II he was commanding a submarine of the Asiatic Fleet which he took out on its first war patrol and was awarded the Navy Cross for his actions. He eventually retired as a rear admiral before becoming the President of the National Rifle Association.

Like his grandfather before him Morton C. Mumma III graduated from West Point but elected to serve in fledgling United States Air Force in 1948. He legged out in 1957.

I noted that Morton, Junior and I had a lot of similarities. We were both NRA members, Naval officers-although I had far fewer gold rings on my Service Dress Blue’s cuffs than he, Distinguished with the rifle, and our fathers were shooters. Mumma was also a submariner and I grew up in New London, Connecticut, home of the US Navy’s Submarine School.

Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy postulated in 1929 that it is possible to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps: the famous “Six Degrees of Separation.” The most direct steps connecting me to Mumma had nothing to do with our mutual shooting accomplishments or naval service, it was submarines.

Growing up in a Navy town many of my friend’s fathers wore the twin dolphins of the submariner. Chief among them was my running mate Gordon’s father, Allan Carl Bryson. Mr. Bryson was tight with The Old Man and also a teammate on Quaker Hill Rod and Gun Club’s Nutmeg Pistol Team. Mr. Bryson has enlisted in the Navy in the dark days of the Great Depression and had risen, by dint of natural intelligence and hard work, to the rank of Commissioned Warrant Officer, a rare feat in the1950s.

After completing boot camp Mr. Bryson spent an abortive few months as a Pharmacist’s Mate striker before he found his true calling as a Machinist Mate. When I knew him his mechanical skills were much in demand upgrading and repairing the many High Standard pistols popular at the time with most of the New London County Pistol League shooters.

After being rated a Machinist’s Mate he went on to complete the demanding curriculum at the Sub School. Ordered to the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard for new construction he became a plank owner of USS Squalus (SS-192). On the morning of May 23,1939, fresh from a yard overhaul, the 310 foot submarine slipped its mooring at the mouth of the Piscataqua River and shaped course for the Isles of Sholes to perform a series of test dives.

Serving as a compartment telephone talker, Bryson’s duty station was in Squalus’ forward battery room. Headphones clamped over his ears muffled the ah-OOG-ah” “ah-OOG-ah” of the klaxon sounding the diving alarm. In response, the sub quickly slid beneath the surface of the frigid Atlantic at 0840. As the boat submerged the 36-inch diameter main induction valve, which provided air to the diesel engine, failed to close. Sea water gushed in quickly flooding the aft torpedo room, both engine rooms, and the crew’s quarters, drowning 26 men, as Squalus plummeted 243 feet to the seabed.

With the Grim Reaper as an unwelcome shipmate, the trapped men endured penetrating cold, damp, darkness, and toxic air while awaiting help. Squalus lay lost and helpless for nearly five hours until her sister ship, USS Sculpin (SS-191), discovered her rescue buoy

As quickly as they could steam, fly, or drive all the Navy’s rescue resources converged over the stricken sub. In a scene of organized frenzy the rescuers evaluated the situation, prepared a plan of action, put divers over the side and, under dangerous conditions, affixed a rescue chamber’s down haul cable to Squalus to begin extracting the survivors.

Lifted to the surface in the last trip of the chamber Mr. Bryson was safely deposited on the deck of the rescue vessel USS Falcon (ASR-2), ending both the sailors’ Gethsemane and the greatest undersea rescue on record. It was just 39 hours between the start of Squalus’ ill-fated dive and the moment the last survivor sucked the Atlantic’s revitalizing cold fresh air into his battered lungs, but it must have seemed like a lifetime to rescued and rescuers alike.

With war clouds on the horizon the Navy salvaged Squalus and recommissioned her as USS Sailfish (SS 192). The name, it is said, was suggested by President Franklin Roosevelt. An avid deep water fisherman, FDR said that when Squalus popped bow first from the deep, amid a boiling froth of air bubbles during salvage operations, he was reminded of sitting in a fighting chair and watching a hooked sailfish leap from the water.

I didn’t need six steps to make the connection, just two. Mr. Bryson’s old Squalus was the newly commissioned Sailfish, whose first skipper was one Lieutenant Commander Morton C. Mumma, Jr., USN.

by Hap Rocketto

One of my passions is aviation. It is often said among true aviators that, even in these days of jet powered stealth aircraft; that real airplanes have axles. This harkens back to the early days of flight and fabric covered aeroplanes flown by leather clad airmen peering out from behind goggles as their white silk scarves snapped behind them in the slip stream. It was an era when flying was young, untamed, and dangerous.

So dangerous that, perhaps the most famous pilot of all time, “Slim” Lindbergh had long been acknowledged as the Caterpillar Club record holder with four emergency parachute jumps to his credit. Membership in the Caterpillar Club is open only to persons who have made an emergency parachute jump to save one’s life. Lt. David J. “Goose” Lortscher, USN a Radar Intercept Officer tied Lindbergh with a record four ejections-all from F-4 Phantoms, in about ten years spanning the mid 1960s through 1973. Unfortunately Lortscher’s luck did not stretch to a fifth entry into the club rolls. He and his pilot were lost at sea after a mid air collision between two F-14 Tomcats in December of 1979 off the coast of Puerto Rico.

While the pioneer pilots of those early days have long gone west many of their faithful steeds still exist, carefully groomed and stabled by a generation that understands its roots. These pilots, aware of the past, have preserved the cough and the gout of smoke of a rotary engine coming to life, the singing of the wind in the wires, and the adventure of a groundloop. The days of the glass cockpit and flying by wire may be here to stay but there still exist real aviators who defy gravity and the Federal Aviation Administration just as the forbearers did.

There are riflemen who, like pilots, look back upon an earlier era when things were simpler. In this age of 22 caliber centerfire rifles, and that particular abomination, the range cart, there are still iron men, who shoot 30 caliber wooden rifles, carry their gear over their shoulders and in a simple shooting stool and are still with us passing down the wisdom and tradition of our sport.

There are still a precious few around who remember the days of the campaign hat, O’Hare micrometer, a 1,000 yard stage in the National Match Course, and the hand cranked and comely United States Rifle, Caliber .30-06, Model 1903. More still are those who worked through the teething problems of the first semi-automatic service rifle and the last United States .30-06 service rifle, John Canasius Garand’s shoulder fired, air-cooled, gas-operated, clip-fed, semiautomatic M1.

The last 30 caliber battle rifle in general United States service also had the shortest service life in that capacity. The United States Rifle, 7.62mm, M14, entered service in

1959 and was replaced by the end of 1970 with the M-16, which uses a 5.56mmX45mm NATO cartridge.

My high power competitive career began with an outdated ’03 in a 1922 style stock but I soon graduated to an M1. I hit pay dirt in 1973 when I joined the Connecticut Army National Guard’s Rifle Team and was issued a brace of National Match M14s and as many cans of Lake City M118 ammunition as needed to keep them well fed.

As noted in its nomenclature the M14 fired the 7.62X51mm cartridge. The cartridge has similar ballistic performance to the .30-06 that it replaced. And, while the M-16 platform is the dominant rifle in use, the 7.62 lives on in the M-14s that are used by Squad Designated Marksmen as well as special operations and some crew served weapons.

High power shooters are inveterate scroungers and military team brass is a particular obsession for civilian competitors. While brass scrounging is pretty much confined to civilian service rifle shooters today there was a time when a service team’s expended 7.62 match brass was hoovered up by the bolt gun crowd.

When the Winchester .308 was developed and fielded in 1952 it quickly superseded the venerable .30-06 in the bolt gun community. The relatively short case makes the .308 Winchester especially well adapted for bolt gun shooters as it has less recoil and with a short bolt throw takes less time to reload than the longer .30-06 case. It has since far surpassed the ’06 as the most popular all around cartridge in use. It the commercial cartridge from which the 7.62X51mm NATO round was derived.

The 7.62X51mm NATO and the commercial .308 Winchester cartridges are very similar but they are not identical. This has lead to an involved, convoluted, and lengthy discussion about the interchangeability of the cartridges that would make even a Talmudic scholar’s eyes cross.

I have used, without hesitation but always wearing safety glasses, M118 in my Winchester Model 70 Army Rifle chambered for .308 Winchester. There seems to be no appreciable change in performance from handloads in commercial brass, the cases show no tell tale signs of strain such as flattened primers, case separation at the base, excessive stretching, or split necks. Not only does it appear to be safe but, let’s face it, it had a feature that sets a high power shooter’s heart all a flutter-it was free. The Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers’ Institute which sets industry standards concerning ammunition and chamber specifications, and acceptable chamber pressure considers it safe and who am I to argue with them.

By the way, if you are wondering why I have taken so much time to discuss the 7.62/.308 controversy I have to tell you that I have followed an earlier theme: this is also Hap’s Corner number 308.