Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters So...how bout Charles Askins, Jr.?

Dogzapper, you mentioned this gentleman on the Clay Harley thread, and I have never heard of him. I enjoyed the tales of CH, so maybe you can spin a yarn on this fella?
Don't feel like ya have to, though.
I will accept a "No thank you" just fine.

I only met Charles Askins, Jr. once and that was at Kimber. He was quite famous at the time. Basically, his personal behaviour was terrible; he tried to fight with all of the men and seduce all of the ladies.

This was before Viagra and he was no spring chicken, so he must have been really feeling his oats while he was here in Oregon.

Anyway, Greg gave him a rifle or two and I suppose that Askins' articles reflected favorably towards Kimber for a while after that.

Charles Askins, Sr. was, like Nash Buckingham, a "shotgunning man" and he was a gentleman in every respect. Ted Curtis had hunted with the old man and he told me so.

The kid, Charles Askins, Jr., was a bang-up handgun shot in the 1930s or 1940s and (it's rumored) cheated his way to the top. His writing was controversial, but it sold magazines.

Having read it all, I can honestly say that I never learned anything from Charlie Askins, Jr. In meeting him, I have the opinion that he was a butthead.

Steve

I read �Unrepentant Sinner� and came away with the same impression as dogzapper.

Askins, Jr. sure did like to kill people by bushwhacking them. IIRC he wrote a lot about hiding in the bushes along the Rio Grande and killing folks from ambush. I believe I�ve heard from some others, may be Ken Howell but I can�t recall for sure, that one of the colonel�s favorite things to do was kill people.

One anecdote he related really got to me. He was in a tank recovery unit during the war. Anyway, one time he went up to the front lines in a sector that was relatively quiet. The Americans were on one side of a river and the Germans on the other. This one German soldier would go down to the water�s edge to do his business every day (take a dump, to be blunt) in full view of the American lines. Nobody bothered him. Col. Askins finds out about this and decides to kill this guy, so waited about three hundred yards away in a building with an M1 Garand. When the guy appeared and was occupied with his �toilet�, the Col. shot and killed him. The Germans responded with a mortar barrage on the American positions.

What an a**hole! Okay, the guy was an enemy soldier and ostensibly the job in war is to kill the enemy. But for guys who have to live in close contact with the enemy one of the first rules of �real life� in a front line unit is � never stir up trouble if you don�t have to. Here the Col. kills a guy just for the fun of killing him, then he goes away and leaves the poor front line doggies to face the retribution. Who knows how many GI�s were killed or maimed because of the Colonel�s �fun�.

In retrospect, butthead is much too mild.

Jim, I tend to agree with you but I am sure that others with military experience will chme in. What is the difference between what Charlie Jr. did and what a sniper does ?

When I met Charlie Askins, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that he was one of my fans -- so I revised my intense former long-distance dislike of him (based on his writings) and figured This guy can't be all bad.

As I got to know him through later contacts, it turned out that indeed he wasn't all bad.

Just mostly bad. About 90% to 99%, as a rough guess.

His favorite sport was killing people, whether they "had it coming" or not. He hunted on many safaris in Africa, where his favorite professional hunter was a part-time PH whose main occupation as a mercenary usually involved killing black Africans. Charlie gleefully jumped at every opportunity to quit hunting four-footed game and start killing two-footed prey. I'm not sure, but I think it was Charlie or this PH who killed a black baby -- whose parents they'd killed as poachers -- rather than take the baby to a nearby native village where he could be cared-for.

It was "common knowledge" among Charlie's ex-Border Patrol colleagues that he'd gotten another BP officer out from under a murder rap by murdering the only witness.

I liked Charlie but could never admire or respect him. He gave his autobiography the most fittingly descriptive title in all of literature -- Unrepentent Sinner. The man didn't even have the slightest desire to be -- or to be considered -- good.

I'll never forget how one of his editors began the note telling us that Charlie had died: his first line was "Hell just got fuller."

The difference lies in the men themselves. What a sniper does is his job, his duty, an integral part of his "MOS." What Charlie did was his hobby. I see no kind of similarity or comparison.

One of my best friends was a "Carlos Hathcock" in the Pacific during World War Two. In his late 70s, he's still tormented by his many kills when he was a teen-aged Marine on Okinawa and other South Pacific islands. He was captured twice but killed his way (a) out of a prison camp and (b) out of custody on the way to another prison camp. Charlie would envy him.

I understood that Audie Murphy's guilt over the people he killed was what destroyed him. tom

Ray Atkinson gave an account of Askins on AR as he served under him in the Border Patrol. He said Askins was a tough guy and would just as soon shoot you in the face as anything.

I never did enjoy his writing very much and I go along with Ken Howells opinon of the man.

I hope this ripping up of gun writers ends with Askins.

I read Hell I was There and thought, "Damn!"

I read Urepentent Sinner and thought, "Damn!"

They were not the same "damn" thing.

Pumpgun, I never knew that Audie Murphy was "destroyed" by "guilt." He was killed in a light plane crash, in 1971, at the age of 47.



I met him once at King's Gun Shop, in Los Angeles, and talked with him for about an hour. We talked of guns and hunting. Movies and WWII were never mentioned. It was a pleasant conversation and he appeared to be quite "normal" to me, and seemed to be very personable and easy going.



He had married a young starlet named Wanda Hendrix, and from what I heard on the Hollywood "grapevine", they fought verbally like cats and dogs... but that's not too unusual in hundreds of thousands of marriages. He got into a bit of trouble once for beating the crap out of a man who was beating his dog nearly to death... but who could stand by and watch some a$$hole beat his dog to death?



I just never heard he was "destroyed" by guilt for having killed so many Germans in WWII.



FWIW. L.W.

I believe that the firearms writing field is like most others; there are a few bad apples and a great many good guys. When we run into a bad one, we all know who he is and we avoid him. The company of the vast majority of gun scribes is to be treasured

Most of the gun writers I know are fine, honest men who simply love firearms and hunting. It is a pleasure to be with folks like this and to count them as friends.

Most of them are fabulous riflemen and totally devoted to the sporting ethic. That's the truth.

Steve

Steve,

Like you, I believe there are bad apples in every walk of life. The only gun writers I know are on this forum. My experience with them is much the same as yours. They are great people who just happen to love guns and hunting. Much like a whole bunch of the rest of us. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

I have been truly blessed to know some of the best, if only thru the wonders of the internet. the9.3guy

Then you'll be pleased to learn that I've been holding back rather than post expos�s of writers whom some of you have expressed admiration for -- whom I know to have been liars and frauds unworthy of your respect.

I much prefer to defend writers whom I knew to be worthy of your admiration but whom so many readers express intense dislike for. Even that -- though much more pleasant than exposing the seamy sides of writers unworthy of admiration -- is not exactly my idea of great fun.

Best of all is confirming the worthiness of writers whom I know to have been worthy of your deep and abiding admiration. But even this brings home the sad fact that so many of my old friends, colleagues, and mentors are dead. That isn't fun either. I appreciate the truth of the comedian's quip -- which has never given me a chuckle -- that "You know you're getting old when your address book starts filling-up with dead guys."

I never knew Francis Sell, but everything of his that I've read had "the ring" to it. A perceptive, judgemental hunter-shooter friend of mine knew Sell -- his neighbor -- well during Sell's last several years and (I'm happy to say) told me that Sell was a great example of the genuine article. I wish I'd known him.

I remember reading an artcle or excerpt by Askins in a monthly magazine some years back, which detailed his being the first to kill a man with the S & W 44 mag. I can't remember which magazine it was but at that time I wondered why they would print it. I realized that Askins came off as an arrogant, pompus bully who would probably throw tantrums if he wasn't quoted verbatum. I never read any of his ramblings after that time.

LW, I understood that he was plaged by nightmares and drank a lot as well as gambling. I could be wrong, but I don't think so. tom

A couple more writers are a source of amusement to me. A few years back I read George Leonard Herter's description of an encounter with a slick young lieutenant who collected a huge number of war trophies from front line boys, taking them on the pretext of need to study them for war intelligence. They ended up in his den back home.
I sure wish I could find that passage again. While unnamed, Sharpe was astutely described, and by one of America's most read writers.
Cheers from Darkest California,
Ross

Ross, I used to live near the writer you've just referred to, but lost all desire to meet him after something that my friend Hank White (owner of the H P White Laboratory) said about him. At the lab one day, Hank told me that he envied my ability to write, that he'd always wished he could. Then he waved his hand over toward the writer's place and said "Our neighbor over here can make the English language roll over and do tricks -- but he'll say anything to finish out a page." (I later heard the same kind of allegation from other stalwarts of American gundom.)

That was before I later lived near Elmer Keith and came to know him well. I'd read a lot of Keith's stuff, of course. So I asked Hank whether he knew Keith. "Oh, yes!" he said. "Very well." Then he told me that Keith (a) knew guns and game better than anyone else he knew, (b) was totally serious about guns and hunting, (c) received as a peer and friend anyone who shared his interest in guns and hunting, (d) was the best shot he knew, and (e) was totally and uncompromisingly honest in every way. In the decades that Elmer and I were friends, I found all this to be true of him -- plus the additional attributes that Truman Fowler told me about Elmer -- his instant recall and accurate memory for fine details. From my long familiarity with Elmer, I don't think anyone ever gave him more respect than he deserved. His editors and publishers (except Fowler and General Hatcher) certainly exploited him brutally and unmercifully.

Incidentally, during the senior Askins' last years, when he was bed-ridden and unable to keep up his commitment to the magazine (Outdoor Life, IIRC), Elmer ghost-wrote his articles and columns for him -- so that Askins, Sr, would continue to receive his stipend. I always got the impression that the older Askins and Elmer had a better, closer "father-son" relationship than Sr & Jr had -- at least as mutually esteemed writers.

I never knew most of the writers that sit in my father's library, and only now realize how many of them he did know through his job. One that always made me wonder however, is a book called "The shotgunner's book" by Colonel Charles Askins. I get him and his father( Major Charles Askins)? mixed up. What struck me as I look at it was the feeling I got when I first read it. I could not keep all his books so prioritiezed Dad's books as "signed" and " good reads"
Askins book was kept only because it has an inscription to Dad - otherwise it would have been tossed, because I did not really enjoy reading it!
To Mr. Ken Howell, did you ever meet a man from Quebec by the name of Bob Snowball? He was a good friend of Dad's and built quite a few wildcats with him, had a real dry sense of humour, also. I think there is a picture in one of the early handloader magazines in Harvey Donalson's columm with him and Mr. Donaldson ( another who was old enough to be my Grandpa!) Sure miss those grand old men....
Catnthehat

I never met Mr Snowball.

Who was your dad? What was "his job" that you mention?

My Father was A.R. "Bob" Todd. He worked for Canadian Indusries Limited - C.I.L. , for 30 years or more, and was technical directer for the Shooting Federation of Canada, worked as a venue coordinator for the Olympics, and a whole bunch of other things too numerous to mention in one post!

He knew the outdoor writers through his travels and shooting competitions. He also freelanced, but there were probably a lot of caveats in his contract with C.I.L.

I'm not too sure how many times he made our Bisley and other national teams but it was more than a couple, and starting int the late '50s, he was gone on every National team as a manager or as a venue coordinater. after C.I.L. sold out to I.V.I., he did ballistics and firearms consulting, and worked more with the I.O.C. He was truly a great man in Canadian shooting sports, and I miss him dearly.

Catnthehat