by Hap Rocketto
Quite often seemingly harmless individual events occur in just the right order and place in time and geography to create catastrophe. This condition serves well for the definition of an accident-a string of incidents when taken individually are harmless but when combined cause a larger event to occur. For example, on September 8, 1900, the greatest natural disaster ever to strike the United States swept away Galveston, Texas. In the early evening hours of that day, a hurricane struck Galveston bringing with it a great storm surge that inundated most of the low lying Galveston Island and the city of Galveston. A combination of a category four hurricane, a huge storm surge, and a population that simply would not believe the warnings of the Weather Bureau’s station chief Issac Cline stood by to watch the pounding waves. In just a few hours the lives of 8,000 people, including Clines’s wife, would be snuffed out.
Almost a century later, in late October 1991, the “Perfect Storm” occurred in the North Atlantic. This nor’easter was created by so rare a combination of factors that they happen but once a century – a deteriorating hurricane suddenly regained strength and joined with two other late season storms. Flogging the seas into waves ten stories high and driven by winds of 120 miles an hour, the storm bore down on the doomed commercial fishing boat ‘Andrea Gail’ and its crew.
On Veteran’s Day 2000 three such great natural forces came into convergence at the Quaker Hill Rod and Gun Club. The not unexpected results, when one knows the participants of this confluence, created a shooting disaster of epic proportion. Force one was Steve Schady who was conducting his annual Veteran’s Day Obsolete Service Rifle Match. The second force was Shawn Carpenter, a shooter of high quality with a penchant for inadvertently destroying any firearm loaned him. The final leg of this wobbly three-legged stool was Steve Rocketto, another shooter of high quality given to an occasional lapse in good judgment.
In preparation for this tournament Rocketto and Carpenter repaired to the range on the day before with Steve’s “United States Rifle Caliber 30 Ml 1917” to sight it in for the big match. In just a few minutes they had the rifle zeroed in for 200 yards and were prepared for the next day’s contest. In his heart of hearts Steve, who has a well hidden romantic turn to his soul, truly believes that his rifle is the actual Enfield used by Sergeant Alvin York during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive when he captured 132 Huns and was awarded with the Congressional Medal of Honor for the deed. He knows it to be true because the guy who sold the rifle to him to him at Ye Connecticut Gun Guild’s annual show told him so. He also owns a piece of the True Cross as well as three “magic” beans he once swapped for a cow, The deed to the Brooklyn Bridge rests comfortably in his safe deposit box. How he obtained these rarities are stories best told at a more opportune time.
On the morning of the match Shawn, at Steve’s gentlemanly insistence, shot first and tallied up strings of 92, 95, and 89 for an aggregate score of 276. In the end he would win the match and place in the second two sub aggregates with this fine display of the manly art of marksmanship. Steve was next up and started with a passable 89 in the first stage, which was slow fire prone at 200 yards. He followed up with a 38 and backed that up with a 35 for an aggregate score of 102, placing 25th in the field of 28.
The rifle, claimed Shawn, was working just fine when he handed it to Steve. His score lends credence to his story but, after all, he is Shawn and perhaps his innate ability to destroy rifles was just lying dormant until some unsuspecting pawn in this story picked up the rifle. Steve, the pawn, says the rifle sights seemed loose and he just might have tightened the sight lock screw in anticipation of ‘The Curse of Shawn’. The slightly lower first stage score gives his story validity, but did he tighten or loosen the thumbscrew? The lower scores in the last two stages make the later scenario seem valid. And, who in his right mind would set up a match such as that created by the fertile mind of Schady? Three strings of ten shots, fired from ancient rifles by ancient shooters, at a distance of 200 yards from a veritable potpourri of positions and times was, without doubt, the catalyst for this disaster.
The setting was ripe for a shooting catastrophe of monumental proportions and that is what happened. In retrospect it is impossible to determine the direct cause and lay responsibility at anyone’s feet for the calamity. All that is known is that the Marx brothers of shooting created a situation that made them as helpless before events on the range as was Galveston and the ‘Andrea Gail’ before the onslaught of lesser natural forces than Schady, Rocketto, and Carpenter.
