I always here about Jack O'Connor since I got my first computer back in 2002.
I even met him at the NRA convention when I was a a teenager, (for about 5 minutes) but I have never read much of what he wrote. I do remember a few articles in (I think it was ) Outdoor Life. All the reloading manuals credit him with bringing the 270 Winchester out before the public to the largest degree that any writer did, and I know that he was able to hunt in many places in the world and that he had a passion for sheep hunting.
That's about all I know about him.
Did he ever publish a book? Or books?
What I read posted about him seems Hot vs. Cold. Many people liked his writings, and many hated them. What made him so polarized?
I am a pretty old man, and I have been a "gun-guy" all my life, and yet I know next to nothing about Jack O'Connor, and I feel a bit "outside, looking in" when I read posts about his articles. Having not read much of his writing myself, I can't have a valid opinion.
What do you guys think?
Not much of what he wrote is really all that controversial (medium cartridges put in the right spot, etc), but I think its due to the fact that from what I've heard he could be distant so people projected onto him the characteristics they wanted him to have. Most of the critics have some variation of him being born with a silver spoon, being well off financially, hunting with custom rifles, and needing a guide. From what I've read his life wasn't always all that easy, he just didn't talk about the bad parts as much as other writers of his period. The guy was born in Arizona less than 20 years after the end of the Apache wars, was from a divorced home when those things just didn't happen without scandal, so I'm sure his childhood wasn't always that easy. And "having money" in early Arizona was probably a lot different than being rich.
Looking at the bio the Jack O'Connor center put together, at times as a kid he lived in a tent, market hunted to feed a sawmill crew, and lied about his age to join the WWI army at 15 before being discharged due to tuberculosis which was often a terminal illness back then. If some other gun writers of his period had those experiences they would've mentioned them in every article. If O'Connor mentioned them at all it was just in passing and even then only partially.
Most of the stuff people fault him for such as guided international hunts and Biesen rifles was from the late 1940s on, when he was over 50. Seems that he worked multiple jobs to that point (teaching, outdoor life, and writing non-hunting stuff for other magazines) and he seems to have figured out early on that the money from publishing books was a lot better than magazine articles (write once and cash a royalty check every time it sells rather than pay check to paycheck of articles). I think he talks about this in his last book of how the monthly articles were his paycheck and the books were for his nest egg. So he was probably doing a lot better financially at that stage of his life than some other writers of the period that are held up as the "common man" but I don't think its necessarily because he was handed anything but rather just good old fashioned smart decisions.
