So Shoot Me
by
John T Lockwood
The first morning I shot an elephant in my pyjamas. How he got into my pyjamas, I don't know. -- Captain Saulding (the African Explorer)
We took some pictures of the native girls, but they weren't developed. But we're going back again next year.... -- Captain Spaulding (the African explorer).
The sporting magazines of the 1950's gave my older brother Al and me a
glimpse of a world in which large numbers of game fish were caught by happy
fisherfolk who posed for the camera with stringersful of trout, bass, pike, and
salmon. Field & Stream, Outdoor Life, and Sports
Afield found their way into our shared home, our shared bedroom and our
individual imaginations. However, as the years passed and I approached my
majority, other concerns pushed aside this dream world.
Recently, I had an opportunity to renew my acquaintance with that
world. I thumbed through a copy of Field & Stream while
waiting in a barber shop for my turn in the chair. The magazine has changed
only a little in forty years. Articles dealt with bass fishing secrets, boat
repair, camping safety, and guns. Lots and lots of guns. The gun articles and
ads had the angry, hostile tone of a survivalist newsletter. It was quite clear
to me that the gun people picture themselves under siege by an army of
vegetarian, candy-assed fairy-boys flogged into action by a pack of meddlesome,
shrieking women. I did not remember this nastiness in the gun business from my
childhood. Of course, I had little interest in guns as a boy and therefor
largely ignored ads and articles which dealt with them in the outdoor magazines
of the 50's. I did recall that the issues from October through February were
less appealing to Al and me as they were heavily weighted to hunting concerns,
but I could not remember any NRA-style stridency in the stories they printed
about shooting birds and bunnies.
Fortunately, not everyone recycles magazines as I do after reading
them. As a birthday present to my brother Al, I was able to find and purchase
the June 1954 edition of Outdoor Life.
I could
not resist looking through it before presenting it to him. Most of it was a
time-machine trip for me. The cover was a painting by an artist named Charles
Dye whose style was a perfect imitation of Norman Rockwell. It depicted a
harried fisherman trying to cope wildly with a clowder of eight cats and
kittens who were stealing brook trout right out of his creel and scamping off
with them. The cover struck me as far too cute for a magazine marketed almost
entirely to men, but 1954 was a prissy, innocent time. Inside, there were
features on smallmouth bass fishing, northern pike, trout and the inevitable
" fisherman's paradise" article which this time covered the wilds of
Saskatchewan.
And there were ads -- wonderful ads. Advertisements for all the
beautiful and amazing fishing equipment Al and I lusted after but couldn't
afford punctuated the articles and features, lined the pages and shouted their
gospel so loud that I could still hear it clearly after forty-two years. God,
fishing stuff was expensive in those days. One ad touted the new Pflueger
Pelican spinning reel -- " the most technically perfected, finest spinning
reel in the world!" . It cost $22.95 (in series 1954 American dollars).
That was an awful lot of money. Al was delivering the Herald Statesman
six times a week to our neighbor's doorsteps at a cost to each of them of
thirty measly cents per week and a goodly portion of those people stiffed him
for it on any given collection day. I had no income at all. Fourteen years
later as a junior bank teller I was bringing home just $60.40 per week. Even
the less pricey Shakespeare No. 1750 Spin Wondereel was out of our range at
$15.00. Today, robot manufacturing techniques and competition from abroad have
forced down the price on fishing equipment to such an extent that one can
purchase a decent spinning reel in 1996 at 1954 prices.
I enjoyed scanning the old magazine. I read the ad for the 1954 Nash
Statesman automobile and another for the '54 Chevy Bel Aire. Both used drawings
to illustrate the cars rather than photos. If the people in the drawing were to
scale, the Chevy must have been about 60 feet long. I noticed that the gun ads
and articles indeed lacked the aggressive tone of today. I had never read the
hunting features as a kid and I discovered now that I actually prefer the
defensive hostility of the modern hunting magazines to the appalling
self-confident brutality of 1954 gunners.
The feature editor for the Shooting section of Outdoor Life
magazine in June of 1954 was a creature who was the namesake of my father's old
friend Jack O'Connor. The Outdoor Life Jack O'Connor was a thin,
bespectacled pipe-smoking type with rapidly graying hair and sagging jowls. He
looked for all the world like a bank examiner or an IRS auditor. He was a
prolific writer. The June issue had three separate articles under his name. His
regular Shooting section droned on for several pages on the
subject of reticules. Reticules are crosshairs or other aiming aides
incorporated into rifle sighting scopes. The tone of this article can perhaps
be judged by this quote: " Obviously, a reticule that covers 6 inches at
100 yards is useless for the man who's trying to stay in a 1-inch X-ring of a
100 yard small-bore target with a match 22 rifle" . Obviously. There were
three and a half pages of such stuff, profusely illustrated. O'Connor also
edited a section called Dope for Gun Nuts (I am not making this
up). This featured new products of interest to -- uh -- gun nuts. Colt was out
with a new .357 Magnum revolver with a six inch barrel -- a handgun which would
make Clint Eastwood famous twenty years later. O'Connor also informed his happy
readers that " those who can't eat or sleep without a 28 gauge can now get
one without wrecking the family budget" by purchasing at very reasonable
price a Savage single-barrel model 220. There were also cheaper handguns of
good quality coming on the market in 1954. The falling prices of revolver and
automatic concealables was greeted by Mr. O'Connor as obvious good news. I
wondered what he would have thought if he knew that thirty-five years later
every fifteen-year-old street punk in Los Angeles who could scrape together a
couple of hundred selling dope could afford to pack a heater -- guns for dope
nuts, as it were.
It was a special feature article by O'Connor in that long ago June
issue of Outdoor Life that put the easy-going
who-could-possibly-be-offended attitude of the mid-1950's shooter on display. The
article was called A Week in Noah's Ark. It was one of a series of
articles covering O'Connor's safari to the Dark Continent the previous winter.
The article would appeal greatly to those who would have enjoyed going aboard
Noah's Ark and gunning down the animals in their pens.
" There are a thousand Africas" , begins O'Connor and he goes
on in fine style to describe the Africa of " high cold mountains" the
home where " the mysterious bongo, Africa's rarest antelope, has its
shadowy being" and " where the black buffalo crashes through the
bamboo forest" . He fails to mention the Africa where, just sixty years
earlier, white hunters, armed with powerful rifles, shot to death every single
quagga, then Africa's rarest and now Africa's extinct zebra, and turned them
into rugs. O'Connor goes on instead to relate the tale of his game-tour of
Tanganyika with two other white hunters, complete with photos of deceased
animals lying prostrate before gloating white men and scowling black men.
O'Connor shows great appreciation for the wildlife that abounded in Africa
forty-odd years ago. To him, the finest game animal on the Grummetti plain is
the impala, that " cleanly built, lithe little antelope with beautiful
lyre-shaped horns" . The author (" your gun editor" ) is shown
in one photo lifting the head of his " record-book" impala to display
for the camera its beautiful pair of lyre-shaped horns and its pair of blank,
lifeless eyes. He seems rather pleased with himself. He had plugged it with a
.300 Magnum from his hiding place behind a five foot anthill 250 to 300 yards
away. Can you imagine the thrill?
O'Connor's friend, Herb Klein, of the Texas Herb Kleins, also had fun
with the impalas. The description of his near miss must be set down exactly as
written:
Herb had fired his .257 Weatherby Magnum just as the ram turned. The bullet broke the shoulder and practically took the leg off but did not get into the body cavity. We trailed the impala until it was so dark we could no longer see. Twice we jumped him but he was watching his back track and always got out before Herb could shoot. Next morning we took up the trail again. But soon we came to the end. During the night, Hyenas had found and killed the wounded impala, and all they left of him was a patch of blood, a few hairs, and the contents of his stomach. They had even carried away those beautiful record-book horns, and we never did find them.
The thought of a pack of wild hyenas tearing around the African plains
maltreating wildlife is pretty disgusting, I must say. Perhaps this incident
colored O'Connor's opinion of hyenas, for he had little good to say about them.
They were " insolent, big, stinking" . Furthermore, " the hyena
is the most repulsive animal in nature, a creature which looks as though he'd
been buried and later dug up" . Don't feel sorry for Herb, by the way. He
got his share of African fauna. He is shown in one photo caressing his rifle as
he kneels behind " his fine bull topi" along with some of the "
safari boys" who posed stiffly, refusing to smile. One of the "
boys" is lifting the head of the topi, the better to display the beauty of
the dead animal for the camera.
O'Connor shot a buffalo along the Simiyu River " when we were
hunting lions" . Couldn't he tell the difference? He did not, however,
shoot any giraffes. " Few Americans do" , he elucidated. He showed
amazing restraint. His hunting permit allowed him four topi antelope, but he
only shot two (" one for lion bait" ). What a guy! All the animals he
described killing in this article were, he explained, " little game"
. " Big game" were rhinos, elephants, lions and leopards, " the
dangerous animals, the ones that shoot back...." . Oh, come off it, Jack.
None of them shoot back. For light recreation, the white hunters did some
" varmint shooting" . One of the varmints was shown to the readership
in a photo. It was a wild dog (" a predator hunters have no use for"
). These guys went to Africa to shoot dogs. No white hunter posed with this
unworthy trophy. Instead, " Thomas, the head boy" , a dignified
looking black man between forty and fifty years of age, is made to prop up the
head of the animal for the camera. Thomas is scowling. All the black "
boys" in all the photos scowl. Later, the white men shot down some zebras
as " all three of us wanted zebra rugs for our trophy rooms" , there
being no quaggas available.
Jack O'Connor, it should be said, shrank from no grim task on this
safari, regardless of peril or inconvenience . He wanted above all to bag a dik-dik.
A dik-dik is the world's smallest antelope. Yes, smallest. This placed the
dik-dik on O'Connor's " must list as one of the most interesting of all
African animals" . The dik-dik story is rather amusing:
One morning with my record impala in the bag and a couple of zebras for rugs, we set out to collect a ferocious dik-dik. When we'd been hunting something else, the tiny antelopes had stood around their lairs staring at us, but this day the word had evidently been passed that we were out for blood. Every dik-dik that saw us took off as though we'd been preying on dik-dik for years.
Notwithstanding, our hero managed to corner a good one. " Take
him, his horns are tremendous" whispered one of his companions.
I could hardly shoot for laughing. The thought of a funny little dik-dik having a tremendous head killed me.
No, it killed the dik-dik. Your gun editor managed to suppress his
giggling long enough to blast his diminutive quarry into the happy hunting
grounds. There is photo of the author, gun slung between elbow and chest,
admiring the dead animal which is being held up by one of those phlegmatic
" boys" for the camera. The dik-dik weighed nine pounds.
Jack O'Connor looked to be about sixty years old in 1953 on his African
safari. Given the amount of time that has passed since then he most surely is
today as dead as a dik-dik. I could be accused, therefor, of picking on some
guy who is not around to defend himself. He doesn't have a chance. It's just
not fair. Not fair? Is gunning down impalas with a high powered rifle fixed
with a telescopic reticulated sight from behind an anthill 275 yards away fair?
Jack O'Connor wasn't a hunter, he was a sniper. What chance did the wild dogs
and other " varmints" he shot have to defend themselves? I would like
to go to Tanganyika with a copy of that old magazine and show it around to aged
black men there. " Did you meet these guys? Were you one their "
boys" ? What were you thinking when this photo was taken? No, really --
the truth."
So Jack O'Connor, your gun editor, eventually died. I hope they propped
his head up out of the coffin at his wake to get a good picture of him, then
wrapped the old varmint in his zebra rug and buried him in it.
Not very white of me is it? So sue me.
FIN
return to John
Lockwood's Page
20 May 1996