by Hap Rocketto
In an earlier era sovereigns ruled with absolute power through a principle known as the Divine Right of Kings. Essentially this meant that the power of the king was derived directly from the throne of God, no mean claim in a time when religion was a most powerful influence. Because of the believed source of the king’s power the general populace also came to believe that royalty had certain supernatural powers, among them was one known as the Royal Touch. In particular it was believed that scrofula, known as The King’s Evil, was particularly susceptible to this cure.
The Royal Touch was a miraculous gift of healing that some royalty took seriously while others, such as England’s William III, who once told a petitioner as he touched him, “May God give you better health and more sense.” were more casual. There are many documented cases of the Royal Touch healing the common man. In hind sight it may well be that the first step in an era of dubious hygiene, washing the supplicants before they were brought into the royal presence, was really the reason for the cure rather than the laying on of royal hands.
I am not particularly superstitious, although I have been known to not wash my shooting sweatshirt during a particularly good run of scores or change my socks if the Red Sox are having a winning streak. Never the less I have come to believe that some members of the shooting royalty have a touch of the touch about them. For example Lones Wigger, the shooting king of kings. His ability to inevitably have a vacant parking place for his car directly behind his firing point at Camp Perry, year in and year out, beggars the mind. There is no other reason for this regular occurrence that I can divine other than something divine.
Another member of the shooting aristocracy with the touch is Art Jackson. I was fortunate to be the amanuensis to this Olympian and world and national champion when he produced his autobiography. As we worked on the project, which eventually amounted to over 60,000 words, he related numerous incidents where he escaped either bodily or competitive disaster by no other means that I could determine other than intervention by a higher power.
One of his more recent encounters with the touch involved me. I once mentioned to him that I was getting on in years and tired of being pounded about by the .308 I shoot in the local slow fire rifle league. He suggested that a smaller caliber centerfire rifle might do the trick and he would keep his eye out for me. Soon my telephone jingled and Art’s voice filled the earpiece with the good news that he had run across a Remington 700 in .222. It came with loading dies, brass, primers, and two stocks and he had purchased it in anticipation of me taking it off of his hands. When he told me the ridiculously low price paid for the rifle I had to ask him if he was wearing a mask and holding a gun in his hand when he acquired it.
My next question was obvious, “How does it shoot?” Three days later an envelope arrived with Art’s return address in the upper left hand corner. Enclosed I found a note and a torn and weathered piece of target with some holes punched in it. Art’s note told me that he had slapped a scope on the rifle and taken the seven rounds of loaded ammunition that came with the rifle down to the range for a test. Art related that there were some old men who were sighting in a rifle. They had no spotting scope so they would fire a round, hobble down range to check it out, and return to repeat the cycle again. I would note that age is all a state of mind because Art is 84. Having little time to wait out these old codgers Art bore sighted the rifle, sighted in on a knothole in the plywood target frame, took one sighter shot, corrected from it, and then fired a five shot group of 1.75 inches at 200 yards. He saved the last round so he could dissect it and determine the load.
As he ambled down range to measure the group he realized that he had no way to prove to me the group size. His eye caught a used target caught up in the brambles, much like the ram in the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, stooping he picked it up, tore off a corner, and, good citizen that he is, put the remainder in the trash barrel. When he got to the butts he placed the shred of paper over the group and punched through the bullet holes with a pencil.
It is apparent that Art has the touch because; in the first place he got a very good rifle for a price that came close to grand larceny. The second proof is the fact that when I went to the range it took me some 20 rounds to sight the rifle in with iron sights as opposed to Art’s one. Finally he boldly shot an unknown load from an unknown source without having it blow up on him.
As a shooting peasant I don’t have the touch. Had it been me engaged in this little episode, instead of Art, I would be out an unseemly large amount of cash. I was lucky to get by with just 20 sighting shots while Art needed just one. Had I shot handloads from an unknown source I would still be recovering from numerous contusions, bruises, and cuts caused by the flying metal fragments and wood splinters of the exploding rifle. As Mel Brooks said in his movie The History of the World Part I, “It is good to be the king.”
