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Two major wars he had going on here on the 'Fire, one was because someone accused him of being a draft-dodger, the other one accused him of being a racist xenophobe who just wanted to kill Mexicans.

Two things he most certainly was not.

As I posted above, Greg was no angel. He was a real, live human being with all of our faults, foibles, and mistakes. His positives so far outweighed his negatives that it is hard for me to understand how anyone could hate him, I guess that's because he never tooted his own horn, but he certainly had enough material to employ a full orchestra.

Ed

I'll try to put a little light on Greg for those who never had the honor and pleasure of knowing him, but before I begin, I ask that other who knew him would chime in and add and/or correct anything I write here. Time does funny things to memory, and it doesn't help that there were times Greg and I were talking that we both were sampling processed grains.

Greg was born in 1947 to a Merchant Marine who had been awarded the Legion of Merit for his actions as a Lt. Cmdr. in the U.S. Navy. Keep in mind that, as of this date, there have only been 248 Legion of Merits awarded since the founding of this nation. In order to be awarded the LOM, one has to have acted in such a way as to have had a material impact on the outcome of a war. Not a firefight, skirmish, or even a battle, but a war. That's the kind of household he was brought up in.
Greg's Dad became a Merchant Marine after being discharged from the Navy after the war, Captaining freighters all over the Pacific. Greg grew up on a ship.

When Greg turned 17, he enlisted in the Marines and served four years including a tour in Viet Nam, which I only knew him once to speak about and that seemed to bring back some real stress, so it was not pursued.

Once out of the Marines, he headed north to Alberta, Canada and became a cowboy. There, he was in place for the beginnings of the oil exploration boom and went to work in the oil fields. Greg started out as a Floorhand and there, he learned to weld and to do machine work from some real savvy old men., soon becoming a rig mechanic. Greg did well enough that he eventually became a Toolpusher, working for a number of Wildcatters.

Greg also became a blaster or "powder monkey", skilled enough that he was contracted to do that cabin explosion for the movie "Death Hunt".

Greg left the oil fields for a while, buying and running a small gas station. I am guessing that wasn't enough for Greg as he took a job offer that would forever change his life and outlook on life.
This was during the time when Mexico was experiencing a huge growth in oil production and other Central American countries were also trying to get in to the game.

Greg was approached by a small group of Wildcatters who contracted him to go to Central America and set up Wildcat rigs and train the locals how to set them up and successfully run them. Greg traveled all over Central America for the next six years, selecting, hiring and training locals to do just that. Keep in mind that Greg spoke damned near no Spanish when he first started that job!
Some of the photos Greg showed me of the rigs and their locations down there are just amazing. Talk about some difficult terrain!

Greg fell in love with the culture and people of Central America, but remained fiercely loyal to America, so he settled for the best of both worlds, living roughly six miles from the Mexican Border.

Greg applied his machine and welding skills, running a shop from the place he built out of nothing SE of Sierra Vista, AZ. He also became a board member of the Sierra Vista Shooting Range where he traveled to Phoenix to lobby (successfully) the Dept of Game and Fish for grant funding for that public facility.

Greg, being a Marine (rifleman first!), got into the BPCR world by way of doing some custom work on a couple of old Sharps rifles for customers of his. As one would expect, he was as meticulous about the BPCR world as he was everything else in his life. Not getting rich at his small machine shop, he learned to create accurate rifles from genuine old Sharps and Remington Roling Block rifles. He also learned to restore Schuetzen rifles and their accessories.

He drew the admiration and appreciation of the top BPCR shooters in the country for not only his rifle building skills, but his shooting and spotting skills. He ws spotting for Lee Shavers the day that Lee became the first BPCR competitor to clean all of the chickens at a registered match. This has only been done twice in the history of BPCR competition.

For a time, Greg also wrote a column in the "Single Shot Exchange" on the subjects of BPCR and Schuetzen rifles.

Greg competed with is own creation, a "Badgersoli", an 1874 Sharps clone made of an early Pedersoli action and a Badger barrel, with accurizing of the action and making a new stock. The last time I was at Greg's, he showed me a Badgersoli that he was building for a customer that was a thing of beauty, with AAA exhibition wood, deeply engraved action, and that was headed to have the action case-hardened by Doug Turnbull.

Not content with just wood and steel, Greg created a small oasis out of his acreage SW of Sierra Vista, planting fruit trees and growing a spineless Blackberry cultivar that was amazing in it's productivity and the size and flavor of it's fruit. He also cultivated a vegetable garden, using minimal water techniques and raised meat rabbits for food and for their manure, which was his favorite garden fertilizer.

Greg, ever interested in the environment he lived in, became very active in water issues, using his knowledge of state government, he lobbied the Department of Agriculture to preserve the aquifers in AZ for the use of AZ residents and not sell the water to the State of California.

Greg was no angel, by any stretch of the imagination, but he was an honest, straightforward man who gave his word and kept it, expecting others to do the same.

Most folks have no idea how much pain Greg lived with every day. His knees and his hips were bone-on-bone, but he was too proud and self-reliant to ask for help. Some faulted him for his drinking, but that was his way of continuing to function. Right or wrong, that's the reason.

He was gruff, abrupt, short-tempered, and had little patience for stupidity (expressed or implied), was quick to judge, but could, and did, change his mind when given all the facts, he was extremely loyal, generous, and considerate.

He lived that life expressed by Theodore Roosevelt; "For those who have fought for it, life has a flavor the protected will never know."

He was a sort of a Renaissance Man as he was an artist in wood and steel, he was a great machinist and welder, he could design and build almost anything he could imagine, he was very well read, multi-lingual, (speaking both smokeless and black powder), and was an animal lover.

He truly was a Western Character, full of life and energy, fixed in his code of honor and beliefs, a good man to have with you in a tight spot, fearless and confident, and one of the finest men I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. To be considered a friend of his was an honor.

As noted by other good folks here, we are diminished.

Rest in Peace, my friend, I'll see you on the other side.

Ed

I do not talk much on this site and did not know Greg. I just wanted to point out that it was not Lee Shaver that shot the first 10 in a row chickens in BPCR. I believe that the fellow that did that was from down in southern Arizona. His name escapes at the moment.

Two major wars he had going on here on the 'Fire, one was because someone accused him of being a draft-dodger, the other one accused him of being a racist xenophobe who just wanted to kill Mexicans.

Two things he most certainly was not.

As I posted above, Greg was no angel. He was a real, live human being with all of our faults, foibles, and mistakes. His positives so far outweighed his negatives that it is hard for me to understand how anyone could hate him, I guess that's because he never tooted his own horn, but he certainly had enough material to employ a full orchestra.

Ed

I have been pleased to have corresponded with Greg quite a bit over the years and I feel a better man to have been friends--albeit in a cyber sense, having never net the man in person-- with Greg. As many here have written, the man didn't suffer fools well and before Greg and I became friends there was some measure of nastiness between us. One evening in particular years ago we butted heads together on an exchange here on the forum, and it got fairly close to morphing into something kind of ugly. By the night's end before signing off I had a hunch he was just as half-shytfaced as I was and so I took a shot in the dark and asked for and got his number via PM. I called him and in a few minutes we were cracking up. That was the end of the nastiness betwixt us. From about that time forward he liked to refer to me as the 'inscrutable one'. I in turn called him 'El Jefe'.

I was on a small email cc list of his, and he would occasionally pass on something he thought was neat, something he was working on or was otherwise deemed by him to be interesting to the small group. I would sometimes do the same. Last year some time he wrote to the group and described having made a custom firearm component from scratch with high-end materials that he had been consigned to make for a customer on the word of the customer that payment for materials and labor would be passed along in full upon completion of the project. Well, that didn't happen and the customer essentially screwed Greg. Greg, naturally, was livid. He described what it was, and offered it to the group for what he had into it for materials only. Now, truth be told I had no use for the thing but being a guy who can appreciate finely made things, things put together by someone passionate about what they were doing and whose hands and skills literally brought it to life, well, I told him to box it up and where to send it, and told him that I'd get payment out to him directly, just as soon as I got his address. When he had received the payment, he could ship.

Well, it turns out the guy trusted me at my word, as the day after I sent payment the thing arrived at my home. This of course before the payment got to him. I was, and am thrilled at owning something so well made, and made literally from scratch. Every so often I'll remember I own it, who made it and where it was born. I'll got into my study, pull it out of the drawer it lives in and unwrap it, and fondle it's smoothness and marvel at the skill required to make sure a fine thing to such precise tolerances and strength. Greg contacted me a couple days later when my payment arrived, and thanked me far too many times for it. When I went to send the payment (no [bleep] checks, CASH ONLY if you please! ) I'd decided that giving a man money only for the material cost he had into it was dead wrong, and even though I never said anything about it when I agreed to buy it, had sent him about double what he had in it in terms of materials cost. Still, in hindsight I came out was ahead on that deal, as I have something that came from the hands and head and heart of a man I respected, enjoyed engaging with and learning something from virtually every time I interacted with him.

I'm sorry as hell Roger and I didn't get out to share a fire with you, but perhaps some day we will still, in another place. Give 'em hell, Jefe.

Your Inscrutable friend,

LNH