I'll mention 2 rifles from the safes. Both ends of the spectrum, but both still treasures.
Late 80s to early 90s a buddy had an FFL and was gunrunning out of one end of his barn. He was playing with a lot of mil-surp stuff and I ordered an old beater SMLE 4/1 and a case of ammo. Paid $69 for the rifle, and ammo. The rifle looked like it had been excavated from a pile of war rubble. Every round of the surplus ammo hang fired. Click....Boom Picked up a couple of boxes of Winchester 180 power points for it and was pleasantly surprised with how it shot. Jump forward 15 years or so and I've got an oops kid (born when I was 39) learning to hunt, and he loves everything mil-surp. I've bought him some beautiful rifles, but he loves that old SMLE. Deer season last year, a guy in the parking lot of Cabelas in Prairie shucked out 5 hundred dollar bills trying to buy that old beater from him. It still lives in the safes...
And when the youngest kid was learning to shoot, I was working all over the country. On a job at Council Bluffs Iowa, I discovered an LGS called Guns Unlimited in Omaha. Had a Winchester 9422 on layaway there, and the day I picked it up they were unboxing some Model 70s to put in the rack. Guy pulled a rifle from the box and the whistles started. Prettiest wood I've ever seen on a standard production rifle. And it is a standard production Model 70 Classic featherweight. I didn't ask the price or even what it was chambered for. I told the counter guy helping me to put it on my ticket. A couple of other guys quibbled that they might want it, but the clerk told them all that I'd spoken first. It's a .308, by the way. Still NIB Unfired... Told myself that it was for the youngest. He's gravitated towards different rifles than me, but it'll still have his name on it when I check out.
