Winter clean out..... (Page 3)

Nice gun.  A lot of the Kimber guys are now at Sig Sauer building guns.  If you've had yours for awhile you got a great gun. They are still good, but I want to buy a new Sig since the Kimber folks are there now. 

Man, check out this 1911 story.....

I'm at my desk one day and they call me to talk to a fella who was in our lobby to turn in a gun to be destroyed.  I go meet him and he hands me a paper bag with an old Colt 1911 inside.  Quite a bit of the bluing was down to bare metal, and even the checker on the wood grips was worn smooth in places, but other then that it was in remarkable condition for a pistol that was obviously much older than I was. Somebody took good care of that old gun.....not a bit of rust or pitting.

The gentleman told me that the gun had belonged to his dad, and since he had recently died and nobody in the family liked guns, the family wanted us to have it destroyed so it didn't fall into the wrong hands. We get that quite a bit.  I asked him to tell me what he knew of the pistol.  He said, "Not much really. My Grandpa was a St. Louis Police Officer and he apparently gave it to my Dad when he got out of boot camp in the Marines. He fought in the Pacific in WWII and my Dad carried it with him until he came home".  WHAT???????  WHAT?????????

I asked the fella to sit down and I sat down next to him with that pistol in my lap.  He was older than me, maybe 60....I was about 45 at the time.  I told him that as far as I was concerned I was holding a piece of history.....great history.  My own Grandpa was an Island hopper as a Marine during THE War, as he called it. (and he meant the Pacific..... he always joked that the men in Europe weren't really in the war.. LOL)  I just looked at the guy after we talked awhile and said, "no way I'm destroying this gun", and handed it back to him.  He said, "you take it and keep it", and handed it back to me.  I just about had tears in my eyes as we talked some more and I thought of my Grandpa, who had only passed a year or two earlier. Can you imagine where that gun had been? What it had "seen"?  In the end I bought it from him for all he would take from me....which wasn't much.  He told me he would send me a mass card from his Dad's funeral to keep with the gun......he never did. 

I take that gun out of my safe a few times a year and hold it, look at it, and let my imagination run......I consider it one of my greatest possessions. I'll take a picture of it and post it when I get time. 

That's very cool.  Have you shot it?

Oh, I think that's right for sure.....but I also think an old gun is like an old engine, or even an old body.....it wants to know it can still go.  I would think about your decision.  No telling what kind of history and memories could come flooding out of that old piece if it fired.

Years ago we got called because someone found an old Thompson .45 machine gun under the floorboards of a house they were rehabbing.  My department sent it off and had it restored and it was hung in our armory like a museum piece.  Fork that.  They made me the lead firearms instructor 10 or 15 years later and one of my first orders of business was to take that gun to the range and run it.  I took a couple of other officers with me on a midnight shift and we shot a thousand rounds through it.  For a couple of hours we were Chicago gangsters from the prohibition era.........and that was a happy machine gun. 

You don't know....you might fire that old rifle and find yourself right in the middle of Pickett's Charge.

Put the feed bag on for some quail breasts last night.  Oven roasted with white wine, lemon juice, garlic, olive oil, and Herbes de Provence.........more global warming please.

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Finally ate up all the critters from last year and have started to eat them as we catch/kill them this Spring.  Sunday was Sauger fishing below the Carlyle dam.  Last night was Sauger eating for me and one of my kids.  (yeah, the blackberries are store bought and we got a little carried away on them before the fish and onion rings were done).  A couple of months until the wild blackberries are out ........and found the first morel of the season last night.  Life is good!

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Take your kids fishing!  It's good to go through life with the confidence that you can always get food.

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Black Crappie.  We were on a private lake I have permission to fish.  I like to take my kids there because I can always get them on a lot of fish to catch.  It's not as important now because they all know how to fish, but it sure helped stoke their desire and keep their attention when they were little. But, it's freezer filling time so it's still good to be able to catch a bunch of fish. We caught the crappie on roadrunner jigs.....red and chartreuse.  A fine day. 

Yessir.....my methods of teaching my kids about fishing and hunting,  and just about everything else for that matter, have been passed down through generations.  I never saw any reason to think I needed to reinvent the wheel.

Chicken gizzard jerky?????  Let us know how that turns out.  We clean and eat quail gizzards and they're excellent......but we fry them.  Never thought about jerking them.

I don't want to be an organ guy......but my mom raised us on liver and onions, chicken livers, gizzards, etc......it's hopeless, I just like them. It's funny too, because my dad wouldn't eat it....I think my mom made them to pizz him off because he always complained and she never quit. LOL