My rant here for the day:
In 1965 my paternal Grandfather from Detroit died. He had a wet bar in his basement all done up in knotty pine. He displayed pretty much all of his guns on the walls of his bar. Dad and two uncles wanted to divvy up what he had, so the day after the funeral he went to Grandma's place to gather them up. My Grandma hated guns and my Dad found all of them in a trash can in the alley behind the house, which he promptly rescued. One was an original 1873 Trapdoor complete with bayonet. I was a 13-year-old kid so I don't recall the particulars of the rifle. That Fall he and a friend went up to Northern Michigan with me in tow. They tied the rifle securely to a tree and loaded it with an OTC .45-70 cartridge, tied a long string to the trigger, and shot it. When it didn't blow up, they repeated the process a couple more times. I guess that satisfied Dad, so (true to form for a 60's home "restorer"), my Dad proceeded to strip all of the wood and refinish it, and also "cleaned up" all of the bluing/browning on the steel surfaces. The Herter's Catalog was my Dad's bible for doing such things. The final product was so "pretty" that he never shot it again and it hung on the wall in the living room for as long as I can remember. As an aside, he did the same thing with an 1894 Winchester .25-35 26" octagonal barrel (SN from 1919) and I remember him complaining about how much oil was in the wood and how long it took him to dry it all out before he could apply some kind of shiny finish to it. Thankfully he left the metal alone. He did worse with a Marlin Model 39 .22 octagonal barrel (1928: an "S" SN prefix meaning it should not be fired with Hi-Speed ammo; in 1932 Marlin designated rifles that could handle Hi-Speed ammo with the HS SN prefix) by buffing/polishing the receiver and the fore-end cap and left them in the white. I inherited both prior to his death in 2010, but they were both just shooters and not collector material. He did the same with a Japanese Arisaka 7.7mm rifle because he could not abide by the red stain on the Japanese hardwood. Thankfully, the two Fox Sterlingworth SXS shotguns he found (12 & 20 gauge) and brought home did not suffer the same fate. The Winchester Model 12 16 gauge full choke (1932) he inherited (won by my Grandfather in some sort of pin board lottery back in the day) he restocked in birdseye maple and reblued using Herter's Belgian Blue (sort of a rust bluing using a long hot water tank and several applications, steel wooled between applications), and I think it took at least 10 applications. And I helped in 1970! The finished shotgun was really beautiful but no collector value. It was a shooter.
I guess that was the mindset at the time.
Sorry to be so wordy and off-topic.
Regards,
Jim
