EXCERPT FROM "RECOLLECTIONS: A BABY BOOMER'S MEMORIES OF THE FABULOUS FIFTIES"

by Jim Chambers

Guns and Me

I'm a baby boomer, born in 1946. My coming-of-age period was the 1950s, which now seems like a million years ago. Things were a little different back then...

Until around the end of the 1960s, getting a rifle was a rite-of-passage for many American boys when they reached the age of 10-12 years old. I know that sounds hard to believe today with so much anti-gun sentiment around, but until after the assassination of JFK in 1963, you could buy rifles at any hardware store or sporting goods store and even by mail order. There were millions of war surplus rifles to be had, and they were cheap. Boys living in rural areas could shoot most anywhere. If the kid lived in the city or in the suburbs, it usually wasn't too far to find a place where shooting was allowed.

Like many boys, my first real gun was a BB gun, a Daisy Red Ryder carbine similar to the one that Ralphie Parker almost shot his eye out with in the 1983 movie A Christmas Story. I terrorized a lot of squirrels and chipmunks in the backyard with that rifle until an incident happened that caused my dad to take away the gun for several weeks while I recovered from the worst spanking of my life. Now first let me say that I loved my dad, but he was the disciplinarian in our family, and he took the job seriously. He was judge, jury, and (almost) executioner. If I got in trouble at school, the principal would phone my mother at home, and when I walked in the door that afternoon, I expected to hear those blood-curdling words from my mom, "Just wait till your dad gets home." A couple of hours later, my dad got home from work, and I got a spanking. The same thing if I got in trouble with my mom - the spanking was deferred until my dad got home from work and could do a proper job of it (my mom just didn't have it in her to spank me or my sisters, as unruly as they were!). Now a spanking in those days was a real spanking applied with the open hand on quivering buttocks. There were no prescribed number of blows, it just depended on the seriousness of the offense, how my dad's day had gone, and how quickly his arm got tired.

But back to the incident. My dad was a pretty good craftsman, and he had all the tools to construct most anything that he wanted to. Not long after I got the BB gun, he made a bird feeder from plans in Popular Mechanics. It was a beauty, shaped like a little house with two sides made of glass so you could see how much birdseed was in it. The roof flipped up so you could pour in the birdseed. There was a narrow opening at the bottom of the glass for the seed to run out, and there were perches on both sides for the birds to sit on while they ate. The whole thing was attached by a two-foot section of steel pipe to the top of the stump of a huge pine tree that had been cut off about three feet above the ground. Now if you've ever had any kind of bird feeder, you know that squirrels will find a way to get to the food. Knowing this, as soon as my dad had mounted the bird feeder, filled it with birdseed, and gone inside to clean up, I hid in some shrubs ready to ambush the first squirrel that managed to get to the birdseed. I didn't have to wait long. A squirrel jumped up onto the feeder perch and started gobbling up the seed. I immediately raised my BB gun and fired from the hip. This looks great when John Wayne does it in an old World War II movie, but what happened was that the BB hit one side of the glass dead center and shattered it, with all the seed spilling out. Unfortunately for me, my dad had observed everything from the kitchen window and came out of the house on the run yelling things I can't repeat here. Let's just say that this happened more than fifty years ago, and my ass has just about healed.

There was another shooting incident a few years later when I was twelve years old. I had gotten a .22 caliber rifle (a Marlin Model 57 lever action, a really sweet rifle) for my birthday. You couldn't discharge firearms (or at least nothing more lethal than a BB gun) in our suburban Atlanta neighborhood, so I walked two miles further out to a friend's house, where we fired our rifles into a backstop his father had made from old railroad ties. That's not remarkable. What is remarkable is that I walked most of the distance along some busy roads carrying my rifle and no one ever called the police. I doubt if any passing motorists even thought of stopping and calling the police (they would have had to stop and use a pay phone, since cell phones wouldn't come along for another three decades). That's the way it was in those days. You saw a kid with a rifle, you assumed he knew how to use it safely and that he was not a mass murderer.

One day at home, I was on the back steps just loading the rifle and unloading it (and pretending to shoot squirrels) when the rifle accidentally discharged and a bullet went into the wall. I heard my mother scream, and I ran inside to the kitchen, where plaster dust was everywhere (walls were plaster then, not the sheetrock drywall that would come later). The bullet had grazed the plaster and made a very noticeable crater. Fortunately for me, the crater was behind the refrigerator and wasn't very noticeable, especially with the stack of old newspapers on top. My mom calmed down, cleaned things up, and sat me down to explain that if my dad ever found out what happened, he would kill me instantly and without remorse. Therefore, she said, as long as he's alive, we'll keep this refrigerator so he never sees the wall behind it. My father died thirty-two years later, and we kept that refrigerator going all that time with duct tape and baling wire. I contributed by praying for the refrigerator's continued health. Luckily they made things to last in those days. My dad must have wondered why my mom was so attached to the ancient refrigerator, but he never said anything, and since he was a bit of a cheapskate, it was okay with him to not have to buy a new refrigerator. My mom got a ton of points for that, and afterwards, I upgraded her birthday present considerably from the usual soap-on-a-rope or chocolate-covered cherries. After my dad died, I bought her a new refrigerator, a deluxe model with all the frills. It was worth every penny.