Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Savage Collectors 1964

I'm interested in what was going on at Savage in this time frame. Curious industry-wide why 1964 was the big year for change, but especially at Savage from 1959-1964. I've got some 1964 rifles with different checkering styles. One 1964 308 DL still has the Chicopee Falls barrel. Must have been interesting times 1959-1965.

Probably not in a good way, but I wish I could be a fly on the wall.

Look at what was going on in the whole country a that time, the times they were a changin'! Maybe the gun manufacturers were already preparing for the gun control act, and all the new regulations that would effect their manufacturing. The president was assassinated, Russia was going to drop a bomb on our heads..., I'd probably retire and move too! ...come to think of it, maybe it's time to retire and move..

Inflation was starting to creep into the picture, the production machinery was antiquated and the pool of skilled labor needed to produce guns that required had fitting and finishing was rapidly shrinking. All those factors were combining at the time and were the driving forces behind the changes that came about. Many of the firearm designs of the time would be cost prohibitive to produce even with today's modern CNC equipment.

Interesting. During that time Winchester certainly took a plunge but Remington stepped up their game with the 700. And as far as I know there is no such thing as a pre-64 Marlin. I don't know that much about Savage's production history during that time but they do seem to have been spotty. I see the 99C less as a reaction to "hard times" and more as an attempt to keep the rifle topical with other popular clip fed guns of the time. The rest of the country's manufacturing seemed to be be going "great guns" during the late 50s to mid 60s.

1964? It's roughly when the bean counters started running the corporations in America and the bottom line and shareholder profits became most important to businesses.

In the gun world, the Remington 700s were intentionally designed for simplicity of manufacturing and thereby profitability. Those early 5 digit, 20" barrelled 700 carbines are awesome in my books.

The Savages of the mid-late 50s were some of the best I seen, especially the Model "Fs" in 243, 250, 300, 308 and even 358. After that? Well...

Those Fs have always been some of my favorites.

Beatlemania. That's what did it.

That and the bad boys of rock - the Stones!

I have a 1964 vintage 99 E in 300 Savage with 20" barrel I bought here from 300Jimmy as a barreled action. It has the old style trigger and no cartridge counter window. A friend has an earlier 99 E in 308 (1962) which has the new style trigger. I just go lucky with the old style trigger, which I much prefer. I guess Savage was using up whatever they had lying around back then.

Actually now that I think about it, what really hastened the demise of appreciation of quality and loss of respect for what our elders accomplished, in our culture, was when we stopped watching Captain Kangaroo.

Ron Coburn told me that Savage had to go to stamped checkering because they couldn't hire enough people to do hand checkering without messing up a lot of stocks. The factory couldn't afford to throw out those messed up stocks. A lot of the other changes also appeared to be a cost thing. David

Makes sense, David. I do have to wonder though, how they managed to incorporate hand checkering during all those years previously in a cost effective manner. Checkering in the big gun companies was historically the province of women who I bet didn't have those skills before applying for the job and as such needed an expensive learning curve. I've seen factory pics (I don't recall the factory) of long benches of frowsy looking babes situated in front of big clear windows bathing them in sunlight. I wonder too if it was a good paying job that was rarely abandoned once acquired- leading to them staying on forever. When checkering on factory guns became commonplace in the 20's-30's I can see the companies scrambling to hire and train a legion of young checkerers who then stayed at it until they just couldn't drag themselves into work anymore which would've been, by then, the late 50's early 60's. Recruiting and training the next generation was avoided by employing machines instead.

Roy, I think your observations are spot on. David

The majority of rod wrapping during the days of bamboo was done by women who were often paid on the amount of work that they completed. This seems to have gone away when the major rod makers (Heddon, Montegue, South Bend, Phillipson, Wright and McGill/Granger, Horrocks Ibbotson, etc...) switched to fiberglass in the 1950s. Maybe there was a parallel with women stock carvers in the 1950s and 60s.

I've told this little anecdote before, so bear with me.

My dad was born in 1918. He used to say that sometime in his lifetime, companies (in general) switched from charging what was considered a fair markup for their product and services, to charging whatever they could get. I would sure like to know more about that particular paradigm shift in American corporate thinking.

There's a movie called The Hudsucker Proxy, a spoof on American industry in the 1950's, which has a scene where a whole department of bean counters are calculating what a hula hoop should cost. After much number crunching by a sea of people on calculators, they came up with .79 each for a 20 cent profit. When it was brought to the head bean counter, he looked at the number, shook his head no, and they added a 1 in front of the decimal, making it $1.79. Shaking his head in approval, the project moved forward.

I suspect there's an element of truth to what my dad said. Bean counters are ruining the world!!! or at least the Savages...

Wonder if unionization had anything to do with it. Going from being paid per part made that passed QA, to being paid hourly? And probably more high quality jobs that pulled skilled workers away, or at least raised their salaries to a level that made hand made items unaffordable.

Thanks Rory, I find all of that interesting.

Addendum: Given the era, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the checkering women were paid less than if the job were occupied by men. That may have contributed toward the cost per gun effectiveness too.

I doubt that unionization had much to do with piece work versus hourly rate. As a veteran of managing union shops (United Steelworkers) I can state that piece work burgeoned under those conditions. In fact, a strong union could make the piece work system thrive- it gave them infinite grounds for negotiations. God, the horror stories I could tell...

Thanks for that, was just taking a wild guess. Guessing it's more that rising wages across the nation just didn't allow the man-hours to be dedicated to fine detail work and still have a product that could be sold at a profit for the company. Still a problem today.

There's a movie called The Hudsucker Proxy, a spoof on American industry in the 1950's, which has a scene where a whole department of bean counters are calculating what a hula hoop should cost. After much number crunching by a sea of people on calculators, they came up with .79 each for a 20 cent profit. When it was brought to the head bean counter, he looked at the number, shook his head no, and they added a 1 in front of the decimal, making it $1.79...[/quote]

True story: years ago the Little Golden Books sold for 25 cents and were going broke. A hired consultant told them to increase the price to 29 cents; after that they sold like hot cakes.