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by Hap Rocketto

During the summer months shooting and baseball absorbs the bulk of my sports budget in terms of interest, time, and treasure. Shooting by far consumes the greater part; but there is always room for a ballgame or two and plenty of reading. I would not be surprised to find out that, outside of Abraham Lincoln and golf, books on the subject of baseball rank as the most published.

One idle summer afternoon, while thumbing through a volume I had plucked from the library shelf; my eye caught a comment by Richard Johnson, curator of the Sports Museum of New England. Johnson, the author of a variety of sport books, wrote that Fenway Park is, ‘…the village green writ large.”

Those of us from New England are familiar with the both the Red Sox and the village green. A green is usually a large plot of ground found in the center of a town and shared by its citizens for communal activities. It is sometimes known as ‘The Common” and in many towns the land has survived centuries of development, often as a park. Three that come to mind immediately are the Boston Common, famous for its Swan boats, the 16 acres of the New Haven Green boarded on the northwest by the Old Campus of Yale University, and the Lebanon, Connecticut green which, at a mile in length, is the largest in the United States.

As a long suffering Red Sox fan I thought that the same may be said of that village green of shooting Camp Perry. Fenway Park, the oldest ball park in the major leagues, opened on April 20, 1912 but Camp Perry has been around since 1907.

The "Village Green of Shooting"....Camp Perry

For more than a century Perry has hosted the National Match and National Championships for most of those years. But for the Great Depression, two World Wars and their aftermath, and the Korean Conflict perhaps it would have a 100% record.

Much like a fan attending a game at Fenway the shooter does more than enter into a competition, he also connects himself with both the past and the future of competitive shooting as he becomes part of the continuing stream of rifle and pistol shooters who have, and will, test themselves against themselves and the best competition the national has to offer.

Like Fenway, Perry is a historical artifact, not just a reminder of the times gone by and a promise of the future. In a real sense it is a museum without the “Do Not Touch” signs. It is interactive and demands that we participate in hands on experiences and, in doing so, become part of the fabric of shooting history.

Rifles and pistols may have changed in the past century but the flat fields and shallow water of Lake Eire have remained a constant. The view that greets an excited 14 year old junior staring down range for the first time is the essentially same scene that greeted the first riflemen who gathered there in 1907. Perry represents a seamless flow of skill, innovation, and competition in the shooting sports that is found in only a few other sports venues such as Fenway.

Camp Perry gives each shooter a common experience that joins him with shooters, living, dead, and still unborn in a special brotherhood. It ties us to shooters around the country, not to mention more than a few foreign nations as well as our past. The grass, pits, and buildings at Perry stand as silent witnesses to this fact as demonstrated at the 2000 smallbore championships.

That year I shot on a team with Art Jackson. Art had fired his first smallbore match at Perry in 1940. Jackson was taught how to shoot kneeling by the great Morris Fisher who shot for the Marines at Perry in the 1920s and 30s. Fisher learned how to shoot the ’03 from those who had shot at Perry on the Marine Team of 1907. In that way I am just two men removed from the pioneers that competed in 1907.

I’ll never be able to pitch off of the mound at Fenway Park as did Cy Young or Babe Ruth, patrol the turf in left field like Ted Williams or Carl Yastrzemski, or squat behind home plate where Moe Berg, Carlton Fisk and Jason Varitek waggled their fingers to signal pitches to a battery mate. But at Camp Perry I can, and do, shoot on the same range, and possibly the same firing point, as Bill Woodring, or Lones Wigger, or Harry Reeves. No other sport offers that continuity or allows an unknown to challenge the best in the game shoulder to shoulder.

The National Championship is often referred to as The Word Series of Shooting. Fenway has hosted nine baseball World Series while Perry has many times that number of shooting championships.

Because In this, and in so many other ways, Camp Perry, like Fenway, is not so much a place but rather a state of mind, deeply ingrained into the psyche of thousands of American shooters.

by Hap Rocketto

I live in a town with a heavy leavening of Italo-Americans. As a matter of fact I am married to one, which is why I live there. The town was a New England Yankee stronghold until there was a large influx of Italians from Calabria and Sicily who were brought in at the turn of the century to work the granite quarries and monument shops for which the town is famous. There was an occasional Neapolitan, who was viewed with the much the same quizzical suspicion as a Giant fan living in Brooklyn during the heyday of the Dodgers, but by and large the immigrants were from the southern most tip of Italy or the island that the province of Calabria seems to be booting like a soccer ball. The town is rich in Italian heritage with membership in one or more of the local ethnic social or civic organizations such as the Sons of Italy, the Daughters of Isabella, the Italo-American Club, the North End Social Club, the Societa Cittadini Calbro Americani, and the local Dante Society de rigor.

Even though I have an Italian sounding last name, there is no K in the Italian alphabet, the closest my Russian grandfather Louis came to Italy was when he was a passenger aboard an immigrant ship bound from a shtetl in the Russian Pale of Settlement, via the Black Sea port of Odessa, traveling through the Mediterranean, to the goldena medena of New York. It was at Ellis Island that some civil servant changed Louis’ last name of Rokita to the more Italian sounding Rocketto. However, in an attempt to put down roots and blend in I belong to both the Italo-American Club and the North End Social Club. Like Boston, the Italian population of my town settled in the north end where rent was cheap, friends from the old country resided, and it was possible, by dint of hard work and saving, to buy a home in the poor but well kept neighborhood.

Of all of the local organizations the Dante Society is specifically dedicated to preserving and spreading Italian culture and to that end sponsors, among other activities, a film series. My seventh grade daughter Leah is studying Italian and her teacher gives extra credit to those who attend one of these cultural events. She implored me to take her to the last film in the series to bank up a few extra points to ward off the possible effects of a future poor grade. Let it not be said that her parents raised a fool. Off we went after a dinner, either by accident or design, of my wife’s rich southern Italian tomato sauce, her superior meatballs, and linguine.

I plopped down in my seat expecting some colorful travelogue movie, perhaps with sub titles, extolling either the quaint customs of the fisher folks of the Isle of Ischia, the wonders of the antiquities of the Seven Hills of Rome, or the stories canals of Venice. I was jerked out of my skeptical reverie when the movie started. The simple title frame of Camilla Calamanfrei’s “Prisoners in Paradise” fading into grainy black and white archival footage of some 50,000 Italians being herded into prisoner of war compounds in North Africa. Soon the sad minions of Mussolini were entrained to ports where they embarked on troopers for a trans Atlantic crossing to the United States.

A map flashed on the screen showing the location of the numerous POW camps the soldiers occupied. My eye immediately went to the dot, seemingly to me to be larger than the rest, in northern Ohio on the shoreline of Lake Erie. The film rolled on with me intently watching the screen for any trace of long rows of small huts, a few red brick buildings, or a tall flagpole standing in front of a wide flat plain to no avail.

The Camp Perry Huts. These 15' x 15' buildings were built to house German and Italian prisoners of war during World War II.

As I watched for visual details I absorbed the dialogue of the various ex-POWs and their wives as they discussed their experiences during the war years. It was a fascinating story. The POWs told of coming from a country that was mostly agrarian, through a war zone, to a land of “Milk and Honey”. Here they were safe from shot and shell, ate better than they ever had in their lives, and had free time to recreate. Some met their future wives as they worked in support of the Allied war effort after the fall of the Fascist regime. They truly were “Prisoners in Paradise.”

Perhaps the luckiest and most famous of all the Italian POWs was Enzo, the baker’s helper to Nazorine the Paniterra. He was able to stay in the United States because his father-in-law’s childhood friend, Don Vito Corleone, engineered a special Congressional act to prevent his repatriation to Sicily. The baker’s son-in-law repaid the debt in full when he helped Michael Corleone bluff gunman sent, by the rival gangster Sollozzo, to finish the botched assassination of his father Don Vito, The Godfather. Or so that is what Mario Puzo would have us believe.

Just as the Italian POWs spent years living in a rough hut in a camp so had I. Since 1975 I have logged about 52 weeks at Camp Perry, Ohio, an internment site for Italian POWs from 1943 through 1945. I was sure that I spotted a row or two of tarpaper shacks that, after some renovation, have housed countless competitors, including myself, during the National Matches. Then again, maybe it was just my active imagination and desire to see them.

At any rate I have to agree with the former POWs when they speak of spending time as a “Prisoner in Paradise.” With the exception of being held behind barbed wire against your will the experience of being a POW doesn’t seem to differ much from being a competitor at Camp Perry. While there we enjoy good food, a safe, simple and clean place to stay, plenty of time to relax as we enjoy the simpler pleasures of life, and find the time and opportunity to form life long friendships. I certainly feel that my time at Camp Perry is paradise although I am a prisoner by choice, not by chance.