Holy cow!!! You were made in 1965 and in 1965 I was in the navy at Little Creek, Virginia at Assault Boat Coxswain's school getting ready for an assignment in the beautiful exotic land of the People's Republic of South Viet Nam.
I have a Savage 24 model 24E-DL made in 1965 with .22 WMR on top and 3 inch 20 gauge on bottom. It has a long story to it.
I was 14 years old in 1956 and lived on a dead end gravel road that ran parallel to Bayou Bernard in south Mississippi. The bayou was across our 40 acre cow pasture and my brothers and our friend who lived at the very end of the road hunted up and down the bayou all the time for squirrels, rabbits, and other small game like quail, doves, and other targets of opportunity. I had and still have a single barrel model 37 Winchester .410. There were a lot of fox squirrels in the pine timber once you got out of the hardwoods along the bayou and the little .410 would not always shoot far enough to knock a squirrel out of the top of one of those tall pines, so I needed to take along a 22 rifle to get them in the pine tops. Carrying two guns was a PAIN.
One day I was down at the end of the road with my brother at our friends house and we were getting ready to go hunting and we were discussing who was going to take what so that we would have a gun for whatever we saw and his mother over heard the conversation and told me to take her gun which was an old model Stevens 22/.410 with the tennite stock. I had never seen one before, but I gladly took it because even to a dumb kid, it's advantages to a hunter were obvious.
Then life happened and three years ago I got a phone call out of the blue from my old friend who happened to be living only about 30 miles from me and both of us are now living in another state. I had not heard from him in over 50 years. He came up for a visit with his wife and we had a good time talking about "old times." He no longer hunts and has not for a long time. During our talking, he asked me if I wanted what he called "an old gun that you used to use" that he found in his mothers closet after she died. He said it is that "funny one with the rifle barrel on the shotgun barrel." I of course said, well hell yeah I would love to have it.
A week later he came up again and brought it to me, but it was not the old Stevens 22/410. It was a Savage 24E-DL made in 1965 which was long after we once roamed the banks of Bayou Bernard in search of lions and tigers and possums. It was in sad shape. The trigger guard was missing and it was covered in thick rust. I mean, it was completely covered in rust. The stock was cracked and scraped. He said the gun had been used by all of her grand children, including his two boys, and they had "sorta beat it up."
When I cleaned the barrels, they were not as bad inside as I thought they would be and the rifle actually shot a nickel sized group at 50 yards from a sand bag rest. I took it to a gunsmith who said trying to polish out the deep pits would ruin the lines and it would "look funny" once it was blued. So I had him clean it up as best he could and Cerakote it in a camouflage pattern because I am going to hunt with it and because that hides about as much of the pits as can be hid. I left the chromed receiver just as it was however because although beat up, it was not rusty.
Even though it is not the same gun that I once hunted with, it is close and comes from the same source and I am tickled to death to have it. I used it on a squirrel hunt last fall and killed 21 squirrels with it over a two day hunt in North Mississippi. I am going to use it this spring to turkey hunt.
It's strange how some things work out in life, but I have lived long enough and seen enough to not question fate. Some things are just meant to be and others are not. If you are going to be happy, you learn to accept that. I was meant to have this Savage 24 and I am going to use it to kill a gobbler in about another week or so even if it isn't as nice as any of those you have. I am going to enjoy using it more than you can ever imagine because I should actually be dead now and this old gun should have never found its way to me.
