1flier,
OK, Partner, you asked for it. Here is a no-BS, totally honest story of my life.
Steve
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Actually, I thought that just about everyone on the Campfire knew pretty much all about me. After all, my posts hold back nothing; what you see is pure Steve in every post. Sometimes this gets me into trouble but, the way I look at it, the truth never changes. OK, I can do this, a short autobiography of the Dogzapper.
I remember, quite vividly, several experiences before I was born. Relating these experiences, however, would weird-out some Campfire members, so we will not go into that. Perhaps, we'll discuss that later, or maybe not.
I was born on June 18, 1943. This was, of course, right smack in the middle of WWII. My dad was off fighting Tojo and Hitler (both), while my mom was pregnant with me. My mom moved back to her parent's dairy farm, out of Corvallis, Montana, to give birth to me. My first in-body recollection is watching a Holstein cow sticking its head into the bedroom window at my grandparent's home. I was about two weeks old at the time.
Dad got pretty busted-up in the war. The last injury was while bailing out of a burning bomber, when two planes clipped wings over Syracuse, New York. Two flyers got out of the planes; my dad and a guy who was blocking the hatch that my father kicked out of the way. Typical of Army efficiency, they gave my father a medal for saving the sergeant's life. My father suffered two broken legs and a broken back when he hit the frozen ground. He spent six months in an Army hospital.
I remember when my father came home from the Army Air Corps. He limped into my grandparent's home, dropped his bag and kissed my mom. I wondered who this big person was.
We moved back to Portland, Oregon soon after that and I vividly remember the hot trip across eastern Washington and down the Columbia Gorge. What I later learned was the Rowena Loops, a viscous part of the old highway, made me puke.
I remember my first birthday, we were living in a houseboat, just above the Sellwood Bridge, and a bunch of neighbors had a party for me and Finky Damon, Finky's dad, Howard had been killed in his first fighter mission in the Pacific. A Jap sniper, who was laying in wait at the end of the runway, put a bullet precisely through his head, while he was starting to taxi for a takeoff. We were treated to a rare boat ride under and around the Sellwood bridge.
OK, nobody will be interested in my education and work, so I'll make this quick and we'll get to shooting, hunting and killing. Let's just say that I graduated from Portland State University with a Bachelor's in Sociology. I was three hours short of a BS in Psychology, three hours short of a degree in Anthropology and twelve hours lacking for a degree in History. Silly me, I didn't spend the extra two terms in college for a quadruple degree. By the way, I worked eight to twelve hours a day, six to seven days a week to send Karen and myself through college.
I worked in a gun store while sending us through college. About a year before I graduated, my dad asked me if I wanted to learn the jewelry trade and start at the store as an apprentice. I did and Dad died in 1976, leaving Mom, Karen and me with the store. The store was badly in debt (about $300,000 because of my father's mismanagement style of doing business and it took me about two years of hard work to get the biz into a profitable enterprise.
Yes, I am a nut-busting, hardworking business person. Never claimed differently.
The store was a an unqualified success, both Karen and I are GIA Graduate Gemologists and we ran a great shop. Rolex was our main watch and we featured fine jewelry, a lot of which I built on the premises.
We were lucky enough to retire in 1992. Karen was 48 and I was 49. It was through investment luck and skill that we were able to do it. That, and hard work.
Shooting, Killing and Hunting Stuff
My Dad was a shotgunner, an absolutely superb shotgunner, on clays and any bird that flies. His chosen shotguns were a Winchester Model 21 for trap, a Krieghoff Super Crown (four barrel set) for skeet and either a Remington Model 37TC or a Parker VH for ducks, pheasants and all feathered things. He shot rifles occasionally, but was not particularly skilled with them. His favorite big game rifle was a Savage 99 in .250 Savage, with which he managed to kill a fairish 6-point bull elk and perhaps a dozen mule deer. Dad's favorite .22 rimfire was the Winchester Model 63 and I still have the two that he owned.
By the way, those who have never handled and shot a Model 63 are missing one of the pure delights of rimfire shooting. No rifle, before or since, has anywhere near the handling ability; the 63 literally points itself.
Dad had a .22 rifle cut down to fit me when I was three years of age. It was a Winchester Model 47 single-shot and I still own it. Yes, I was shooting a rifle at three and I was beating my Dad's azz, much to his delight, with one of his beloved Model 63s by the time I was five.
I killed my first Chinese pheasant with a hard-kicking Winchester Model 97 twelve-gauge when I was about eight years old. It was a great day and, as I remember, I shot way over the limit of five birds that day. Plus quail and huns, of course. Yes, I still own the M-97.
My first big game rifle was a Winchester Model 94 in .30-30. I killed my first deer, a yearling doe, with the rifle when I was eleven or twelve years of age. I killed four deer with the rifle with four shots. Yup, still have it.
During the following year, I sporterized a Springfield 1903 and had it fitted with a Lyman receiver sight. I was handloading by then and, for whatever reason, favored Hornady 150-grain round nose bullets. That fall, I shot my first buck, a 3X4 mule deer with the rifle. I was also ferrying horses to a high-ground with a friend and managed to put a hell of a 4X4 on his tag with the rifle. The rifle was a known-killer by the end of the season.
During high school, I graduated to a Weatherby Mark V in 7 Weatherby. Yup, I killed lots with it, but eventually found it truly exceeded the need.
My next dedicated deer killer was a Mannlicher-Schoenauer carbine with double set triggers in 7X57. This rifle killed way more deer for me than I'd care to recount. In those days, we weren't too particular about tags. We all camped together and stopped shooting when the tags were all filled. I apologize for upsetting anyone's sensibilities, but that is the way it was. I know what my highest year was, but I damned well ain't telling.
I got involved in .22 gallery and outdoor shooting when I was about fourteen. My rifle was an old BSA Martini Mark II with a Litchert 20-power scope. I soon scrapped the scope and worked overtime in a gas station to buy a Bausch & Lomb 6.5-24 target scope. My first gallery shoot was the Oregon State Championships and I won Class C Junior by about twenty points. The next year, I was the Oregon State Class A Junior Champion and I held the title until I became eighteen. I am a Lifetime Master, Gallery.
I was awfully late in killing elk. My first bull was a 6X5 that I shot near Elgin, Oregon with a Remington 700C in .30-'06. I remember that it was dusk and the bull was running across an opening at about 70 yards. I put a 180 Hornady Spire tight behind the shoulder and was amazed when it didn't drop like a deer. It kept on running, so I planted another ...and another. He fell, struggled and laid still.
When I walked up to the bull, I could not roll it over. Hey, it was big, but not THAT big. Eventually, I found that he had hit a jackpine and impaled himself on about two-feet of the broken stub. He was literally impaled and not rolling anywhere until I sawed the pine tree off.
That was a long night.
From the time I was about ten or so, I'd corresponded with Elmer Keith. I met the fine gentleman several times and we always had yarns to exchange. Think of the odd couple; the old guide-writer-gun nut and the young gun crazy kid. Anyway, it worked for us.
Elmer sent me every one of his books and wrote very nice things in the fronts of them. These autographed books are some of my most prized possessions. I've photographed a few of these and posted them on the Campfire. The inscription about my dall sheep from the Yukon is especially cool.
Speaking of the Yukon sheep, I killed it with a Model-70 Featherweight at a distance that no man should ever shoot. The hunt was in 1978 and it was up the Snake River out of Goz Lake. I killed a double-shovel caribou on the trip, as well. He was sleeping and I shot him in his bed, as he noisily belched and farted, at about twelve feet.
As I grew older, my rifles became more refined, as did my handloading. Eventually, it was time to do a wildcat and, with Elmer's advice, I settled on the .338-'06. It was an elk killing, deer killing, bear killing son-of-a-buck. Feed it 200-grain Winchester Power Points or 210 Partitions and critters died bang-flop.
Eventually, I decided to write a magazine article about the .338-'06, so I could relate my experiences. Ken Howell was the Editor at Handloader at the time. I called Ken and he said, "Sure, send the article, young fella." The article was published in 1984 and, believe it or not, I still get mail on it.
Anyway, the .338-'06 article wasn't even published yet when Ken called me and asked if a good friend of his contacted me with questions about the cartridge. He said that his friend was Chub Eastman, who was the Sales Manager of Leupold & Stevens. Chub and Ken went back to their Montana days and Ken said that it was OK to give Chub a copy of the manuscript, if I chose.
Chub called a day or two later and we had lunch at a cafe in Milwaukie, near my store. We got along from the first. As he left, he asked me if I'd like to ride along to Kimber of Oregon. He had to settle up a bill (Greg Warne was horrible about paying bills) and he needed a bit of repair on a set of Warne scope rings. I accepted, so Chub introduced me to Greg and Jack Warne.
Ken left Wolfe about then, but his replacement, Al Miller, phoned me at the store one day and asked when I was going to send them another article. Actually, I only thought of doing one, but I thought to myself, "Why not??? Maybe I can work out something with Kimber" OK, I was going to be Steve the Gunwriter.
So, I called Greg and we worked out a deal. He had a bunch of little wildcats going and they needed ink. This would give me rifles to shoot and things to write about.
The first one was a Handloader article about the 6X45, followed closely by the .17 Mach IV and a bunch of case-forming/handloading articles. It didn't take long until I was a common sight in the pages of Handloader.
After several years, I asked both Dave Wolfe and Al Miller if they were considering me for a Contributing Editorship. Both passed the buck and stalled enough that I knew that it was never going to happen. Frankly, my stuff was better than a lot of Wolfe's offerings at the time, or so I thought, and it kinda pissed me off. Then came a new editor, who will go unnamed and who is very famous even today, who was the EDITOR FROM HELL. He was a real sonofabitchazzhole and it was time for Steve to leave.
Absolutely at the same time, June of 1990 or 1991, Chub invited me on Red Mist II, a firearms industry prairie dog shoot out of Glenrock, Wyoming. Ned Kalbfleish, the owner/editor/publisher of the fledgling Varmint Hunter Magazine was also on the hunt. On the first day, he asked me to be a Contributing Editor. It was probably the best and worst decision of my writing career.
It was the best decision because my days at Wolfe were over and it was the worst because I could no longer write about my love: big game hunting.
I wrote all sorts of precision rifle/precision handloading stuff for the next thirteen years. My last article, on that unbelievable loser of a cartridge, the .223 WSSM, appeared in the April 2004 issue of The Varmint Hunter Magazine.
By the time I ended my career, I published well over 100 feature articles and goodness knows how many shorts.
My divorce from the firearms industry and writing actually happened some time in the fall of 2003 (the magazine is a quarterly and it takes a loooong time to get to print). It was dramatic, it was fast and it was final.
We will not discuss why I quit writing. Let's just say that I received two fatal blows in a short period of time. Friends were not friends and it was time for Steve to get on with what was left of his life.
So, I just walked away from writing. Cold, clean, just walked away and never looked back. Karen was shocked and truly thought I couldn't do it; one day I was writing madly and planning future articles ..... the next day, writing and my beloved firearms industry were absolutely completely dead to me.
I have broken my personal vow to never write again precisely twice. The first was a total rewrite of the story that you know as Shootout with the Black-and-White Cat that is in the 24HourCampfire's Smokelore Magazine. The second was the two lead-in sections I wrote for the upcoming Nolser Reloading Manual Number Six. Both were done on a No Charge basis.
During all of the time I've written about rat shooting, rat cartridges and rat rifles, I was hunting big game, including well over fifteen trips to Alberta, British Columbia and Quebec, two lengthy African safaris (Zimbabwe in 1984 and RSA in 1989) and hunts all over the Western United States. I have the actual numbers of dead critters, but few would believe me, so I will not post them.
Also, during the late 1970s and the entire 1980s, I worked as an unofficial elk guide here in Oregon. This gave me the opportunity to kill a whole lot of elk and see many more made dead. This was a unique experience and it gave me an excellent perspective. Johnny wants me to write about it, but I'm done writing forever. I'll prolly just write it up one day and give it to him.
Other than that, we're pretty boring. Karen and I are paying dearly for all of the dead critters we hauled out of the bush. We gimp along, taking care of our home of forty-three years. Excitement for us is taking a Sunday drive, a short one, in our 2006 Duramax truck or visiting a different Catholic church for Mass. Having said that, we enjoy life and still are madly in love with each other.
My shoulder, which was operated on some time ago, has prevented my active shooting for a couple of years. And, if I'm really honest about it, I'm really not as interested in shooting and hunting as I once was. I love helping others solve shooting and handloading problems and I love a good hunting yarn.
I am a writer and will always be a writer in my heart. In truth, the Campfire has very much taken the place of my magazine writing, only it's better. At the Campfire, we can work one-on-one or with several folks at the same time. Folks with a problem get answers quickly and we all totally enjoy the fellowship. The Campfire is a cyber-community at its best.
I'm sure that I am forgetting a bunch and I'll add it later, if anyone at all is interested. And if there are questions, just ask away.
