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by Hap Rocketto

In my most grandiose daydreams about my writing I like to reflect that Mark Twain, one of my favorite authors, and I have much in common. We both lived in Connecticut, were educated in Missouri, we both had humorous and undistinguished military careers, and we both wrote short stories.

Twain, of whom no less a literary light than Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn…. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since” began writing in Virginia City, Nevada during the days of its booming silver rush for the Territorial Enterprise, a prosperous newspaper that was for many years the most powerful western journal outside California.

The demand for news was so great that Enterprise Editor William Wright hired a down on his luck miner named Samuel Clemens to help fill column inches. A life time friendship soon began and both eventually adopted nom de plumes that would go down in literary history. Wright became Dan DeQuille and authored the definitive study of Virginia City’s boom years History of the Big Bonanza, sub titled An Authentic Account of the Discovery, History, and Working of the World Renowned Comstock Silver Lode. In his time he was a highly regarded newspaperman and humorist widely considered by contemporaries to be on the same plane as his friend Clemens, who had changed his name to Mark Twain.

Growing up and living on the nation’s frontier Twain was, of necessity, familiar with firearms and their quirks and advised that one should not,”…meddle with old unloaded firearms. They are the most deadly and unerring things that have ever been created by man. You don’t have to take any pains at all with them; you don’t have to have a rest, you don’t have to have any sights on the gun, you don’t have to take aim, even. No, you just pick out a relative and bang away, and you are sure to get him. A youth who can’t hit a cathedral at thirty yards with a Gatling gun in three-quarters of an hour, can take up an old empty musket and bag his mother every time at a hundred. Think what Waterloo would have been if one of the armies had been boys armed with old rusty muskets supposed not to be loaded, and the other army had been composed of their female relations. The very thought of it makes me shudder.”

In his highly imaginative account of his early days in the west, Roughing It, Twain, who was aware of the dangerous nature of sidearms and pocket pistols, wrote about George Beemis who, “wore in his belt an old original “Allen” revolver, such as irreverent people called a “pepper-box.” Simply drawing the trigger back, cocked and fired the pistol. As the trigger came back, the hammer would begin to rise and the barrel to turn over, and presently down would drop the hammer, and away would speed the ball. To aim along the turning barrel and hit the thing aimed at was a feat which was probably never done with an “Allen” in the world. But George’s was a reliable weapon, nevertheless, because, as one of the stage-drivers afterward said, “If she didn’t get what she went after, she would fetch something else.” And so she did. She went after a deuce of spades nailed against a tree, once, and fetched a mule standing about thirty yards to the left of it. Bemis did not want the mule; but the owner came out with a double-barreled shotgun and persuaded him to buy it, anyhow. It was a cheerful weapon–the “Allen.” Sometimes all its six barrels would go off at once, and then there was no safe place in all the region round about, but behind it.”

Twain grew up in an age when firearms were common companions to men and boys and he knew his way around them. From his writings we can also presume that he knew that firearm safety was a state of mind and not a mechanical device. He certainly carried one from time to time as it was often that said the journalists who worked for the Territorial Enterprise “usually carried three essential tools of their trade: a notebook, a pen and a revolver.” I would like to think that I also fit into that adventuresome mold when I cover Camp Perry and other shooting events, except I would simply substitute rifle for pistol.

One day, and I know that day will never come, I would be delighted to find a Hap’s Corner included in an anthology of short stories alongside “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” For all of our perceived similarities I know it won’t ever happen. Let’s face fact, if the Nobel laureate Hemingway does not consider himself in the same class as Twain, who never received the accolade from the Noble Foundation, then certainly neither can I. My situation is best put in the words of another Nobel laureate and one of my favorite authors, Rudyard Kipling: “never the Twain shall meet.”

by Hap Rocketto

As the supervisor of a high school academic department, which includes both chemical labs and art supplies, I find safety an issue that is always in the back of my mind. In the 18 years since my school opened my department has had only a few minor cuts and burns to report. They inevitably occur during one short lab when we teach the kids how to cut and bend glass tubing. Hot glass looks no different than cold glass and glass is brittle so when you mix those conditions with 14 year olds inevitably some skin will be scorched and some blood will flow.

In the many safety bulletins that I read I note that shooting rarely, if ever, shows up on accident lists. It should come as no surprise that this is the case because legitimate firearms owners are well aware of the inherent possibility of accidents with guns and respond accordingly with great responsibility. The shooting sports are very safe. However, I am reminded of some unusual injuries at ranges.

In the 1960s my brother Steve ran the rifle range at Camp Wakenah, the local Boy Scout Councils’ summer camp. I succeeded him in that post when he moved up to, if you can believe it, the position of waterfront director. There he was in charge of a half of a dozen well-muscled bronzed young men who taught swimming and boating. He was even bronzed himself, but that is another story. It turns out that in the five years that we ran the range it incurred the second highest accident rate at the camp.

We never had a shooting accident, however, while the youngsters were waiting to shoot they whiled away the time working on handicraft projects. Many of them had recently bought razor sharp whittling knives and neckerchief slide kits at the camp trading post. While they waited they took out the knives and furiously flailed away at white pine, yellow poplar, and their fingers. Our ready line accounted for dozens of stitches each summer.

The most dangerous area was the handicraft lodge itself. There the boys sat hacking and hewing at lumber and limbs from morn ’till night. The wooden floor was a rust brown color from many years of soaking up scout’s blood. The floor was always covered with wood chips, saw dust, and blood easily reminding one of a butcher shop. Perhaps the only other area that could match it was the scaffold in The Place De La Revolution upon which the guillotine stood during France’s Reign of Terror. Fed by tumbrels full of aristocrats, instead of Boy Scouts, the French abattoir barely outdistanced the handicraft lodge in bloodshed.

In the early 1980s Mark Lasrich and my brother Steve traveled the summer shooting circuit together. When this Laurel and Hardy team ended up at Perry, in 1983, the accident rate soared. About two days into the NRA Championships Lasrich’s glasses fogged up during a rapid sitting string and he tore off his glasses to shoot the last shot. The averages of having a punctured primer are astronomical. Lasrich beat the odds and was rushed to Magruder Hospital. The damage was slight but he had to wear an eye patch for the rest of the week forcing him to withdraw from the rest of the tournament.

The next day Steve, who is a brilliant theoretical and practical physics teacher, decided to leap off of one of the shooters’ trolleys that were provided to move competitors and equipment around the ranges. A quick calculation, based on the estimated speed of the vehicle, momentum, acceleration of gravity, and mass, informed him of the speed that he would need to avoid falling. He started pumping his legs and leaped from the cart forgetting that his mind is much more athletic that his body. Released from the Magruder emergency room with his left elbow in a bandage and his shooting at Perry finished he joined Lasrich on the disabled list. The two stalwarts did not let the rest of the week go to waste. They spent the few days remaining exploring all of those obscure places at Perry that we wish we could visit but never have the time.

Everyone in the free world witnessed me being shot between the eyes during the Wimbledon Cup Match in 1976, but few people either saw, or heard of, this little incident that involved my brother few years later. Steve was sitting on the bench next to the phone after scoring a Leg Day rapid-fire string at Perry. A strong wind was blowing and it dislodged the scoreboard on the target to his left. The scoreboard flew across his point and struck a member of the pit crew to his right a sharp blow to the head. The target puller dropped like a pole-axed ox as blood began to gush from his head like Spindletop.

As Steve turned to help he yelled to the man next to him, ” Get on the phone! Call for the camp doctor!”

“I am the camp doctor!” came the reply.

Surprised, Steve turned in his tracks and asked, “What are you doing here?”

The sawbones shot back the obvious reply, “It’s Leg Day, isn’t it?”

As a result of good training and responsibility there are precious few shooting injuries. Most are generally shooting related injuries, but Leg Day is always Leg Day.

by Hap Rocketto

The Lord Roberts Centre at Bisley Camp is the home of the National Smallbore Rifle Association of Great Britain. It is a very tidy building that was erected for the Commonwealth Games and houses the offices of the organization, an air rifle range, the Malcolm Cooper Range, and a hockey rink and swimming pool. The latter two faculties are part of the multipurpose use of the building which allows it to stay financially solvent. The Cooper range is a fully equipped international range with electronic targets. During a tour of the range I started to think about all of the shooting I had done in the past.

During the course of my shooting career I have fired at countless ranges, some no longer in existence, and at countless types of targets, some no longer in existence. I have shot on the 5V target when it was the highpower target, lived through three changes of ISU/ISSF 50 meter target, two changes in the United States gallery international target, and seen the A-17 ‘bucket bull’ soldier on untouched for as long as I can remember.

I have shot at targets tacked to cardboard backstops, hung on racks, suspended from target carriers, run back and forth on electric trolleys, fed on strips or rolls through the openings of Gehmann and Spieth boxes, and electronic targets that are nothing more than electrical grids woven into black rubber circles.

The electronic score targets are neat because they give you a television monitor to view your shot location. The more sophisticated systems automatically calculate your score and then transmit it to a central computer which records it, updates competitor rankings, and has the capability of displaying, at lightening speed, the current standings to the spectators in the gallery on overhead screens. I marvel at how they work as they are a bit more sophisticated than to ubiquitous RIG-EZ Scorer which usually determines the value of close shots for the hoi polloi who bang away in dark and dank shooting galleries or outdoor club ranges.

The two scoring devices are about as far apart technologically as the pencil, which I think is a remarkable technological achievement and writing the first drafts of Hap’s Corners, to the word processor on which I hunt and peck out the final product. Yet, surprisingly enough, the simple scoring plug is a more advanced technologically than it might appear.

The earliest patent on a “Bullet Hole Gauge” was registered in 1937 by Frederick M. Hakenjos and Charles Baynard Lister. It is no surprise that the patent was assigned to the National Rifle Association as Lister was the National Secretary of the organization and is memorialized by the NRA with the C. B. Lister Memorial Trophy awarded annually to the National Indoor Sectional National Smallbore Rifle Four Position Champion. The gentlemen’s device was fairly straight forward in design, a shaft that had a .22 nose on one end, a .38 nose of the other, and a .45 sliding head on the shaft which, when slid down, fit over the .22 nose to plug shots of the larger caliber.

Russell Wiles, Jr., a noted Chicago rifleman, went one step better when he filled out a patent application for an “improved bullet gauge” in the fall of 1941. Wiles and his father has several patents for firearms related items including a .22 rimfire cartridge, a rifle trigger, a wind indicator that affixed to the barrel of the rifle as well as a target rifle that was of interest to Winchester. They even came up with an improvement on the simple automotive dip stick. Wiles’ scoring gauge improvement simply studded a plastic magnifier with the various sized plugs needed to determine if a shot was in or out. One simply inserted the plug into the bullet hole and read it’s location through the plastic. It was an improvement but it was bulky and cumbersome to use.

Not willing to rest on his laurels Wiles continued to think of ways to improve his scoring device. In the spring of 1953 he came up with what would become the definitive design for manual scoring plugs. He incorporated his magnifying block with a single shaft design based upon an impact tool that combined the functions of a center punch and nail set, designed by Sheldon T. Williams in 1921. The new device was a single cylindrical shaft with a tapered nose. A flange of the appropriate caliber was capped by a plastic magnifier which allowed the margins of the shot hole to be precisely located. Two major innovations, based on Wiles’ observations over years of competition, roughening the surface of the plug and adding a coil spring handle were incorporated in the new design.

Roughening the shaft of the plug, rather than machining it smooth, allows it to catch on the fine tears and fibers in the paper surrounding the bullet hole. A single shot offers a firm resistance as the paper fibers and striations on the plug’s surface firmly grip each other. It the hole contains two or more shots, a double, the grasp is not as firm and a scorer can feel that the seemingly single shot hole is actually a multiple shot hole.

Attaching a spring to the shaft as a handle allows the plug to be inserted directly into the shot hole with out the concern that pressure is being added unevenly causing the plug to move one way or the other. This insures the fairest possible placement. Additionally, the soft coil spring gives the scorer a second method of detecting a double for there is less resistance felt when the plug is withdrawn from a double than a single shot hole.

As a fan of Gilbert and Sullivan, and the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, the words of Little Buttercup singing to Captain Cochran aboard the HMS Pinafore come to mind when I think of the hidden elegance and technological innovations found in the seemingly simple RIG EZY-Scorer, “Things are seldom what they seem.”