Thanks, Rooms! It's always been a pleasure for me too.
I've heard from many people that O'Connor often wasn't very much fun in person--unless he somehow took a liking to you, for whatever reason. I never met him (or Elmer) personally, but got a letter from each back in the late 1970's, after writing them first. I wrote O'Connor mostly about writing, and for some obscure reason he'd seen my very first published hunting article (my first published article, and only other one at that point, was on fishing) in GRAY'S SPORTING JOURNAL. He was very complimentary and gracious.
My letter to Elmer was about handloading the .333 OKH--or rather, the .338 OKH, because that's how it ended up after Winchester brought out their .338. He was very informative, but a really lousy typist (which I also heard from several editors after I got established in the business).
But I never came to appreciate Elmer's hunting writing until much later, because his gun writing was so big-bore, for so long, and my own experience was similar to O'Connor's. Even now I can't read some of Elmer's stuff, like his African book SAFARI, without almost screaming, "You should have just taken a .30-06 with 180 Partitions and not had all that trouble!"
But other than that I now love Elmer's hunting writing. I especially like that he always mentioned the meat, and also some of his descriptions of country I've also hunted. Of course, I live maybe a dozen miles from the Montana ranch where started hunting in the West, know exactly where it was, and have taken plenty of game in the area.
I also came to appreciate SOME of his gun writing, after trying a bunch of stuff he wrote about, and not just in rifles but handguns and shotguns.
But my overall influence in "gun writing" was indeed O'Connor, partly because like him I did a lot of other kinds of writing before arriving in this rather odd trade. Since then, of course, I've also been influenced by a bunch of others, especially Bob Brister in shotgunning, both because he was also an all-around writer (and a very good one) and great experimenter. Got to know him very well, and both shot clays and hunted with him quite a bit. With rifles, for purely technical stuff I'm a big fan of Bryan Litz and Harold Vaughan (who Denton mentioned) because they experiment enough to find out what's actually happening, and have the science background to do it right.
