Neanderpundit

In “A Christmas Story” jean Sheperd recalls the “Daisy Red Ryder 200-shot Range Model Carbine Action Air Rifle” With the compass in the stock and the thing which tells time.(Sundial).

Unfortunately, for those of us in the know, there was never any such thing, except in Shep’s imagination. Oh, Daisy made them, for a while, in honor of the movie (The model is called “The Christmas Dream”) but the original just had the “Red Ryder” brand.

No, the gun with the compass in the stock was a Buck Jones #107, and it was a pump. It was a much better rifle- though it still had a smoothbore it was made a little better, and the “trombone” or pump action made it less cool, in the eyes of a lot of kids. So it wasn’t uncommon for Dads who understood coolness to buy a Red Ryder and order a replacement Buck Jones stock and marry the two; I’ve seen at least one example of this at gunshows. The original stock was rivetted in place, the replacement is usually held on with a 1/4-20 bolt and a square nut, that being what dad’s usually have to hand.

Not too many people know that Daisy provided BB guns to the US government, and those were used in the “Quick Kill” program.

a reprint form years back, seems- on it’s surface- sad.

There are a lot of Christmas memories like that, and many of them were emotionally traumatic, at the time.

Unlike a lot of people I know, I was not raised by wolves. My parents had their moments, like all parents, but I got fed, clothed, educated, and beaten rather less often than I deserved, and sent out into the world capable of dealing with the world. And they were decent people, and set a decent example.

So when I remember those moments- the times when we busted our collective asses to rescue someone from their tragedies, or their own stupidity, or their poverty, the only emotion I feel is gratitude. Thankfulness that we had the resources- meager though they might have been- to make a difference in someone’s life.

Dredged up from this old post, for your enjoyment, I hope.

When I was a kid, I was in the Cub Scouts. I never made it all the way to full boy scout, the local group disbanded before I could get that far. Anyway, our scoutmaster, (I’ll call him Jake) was a big lanky tough guy, the guy from whom I learned to kill cattle quickly and how to saddle a horse without it drawing a breath so the flank billet doesn’t loosen up on you. I idolized the guy, and spent half as much time with him as with my own father, for a couple of years.
I also spent a lot of time with Jake’s son, Rock, who was close to my age, and his daughter, Elisabeth, who was two years younger.

They lived on a piece of property that you could land a plane on, they had horses, some livestock, each year they dug up a fresh evergreen for a christmas tree and put it in a washtub in the living room. After Christmas, Jake would plant the tree in a hole dug in the front yard. They had fourteen of these blue spruces along the edge of their driveway, one for every Christmas they lived in that house.

Anyway, in about my fifteenth year, they moved on. Jake got a job with some packaging company in the south, and he packed up the whole family and left. We didn’t hear anything from them all summer, but that fall, the mom and the kids came by to visit just after thanksgiving. We went another several weeks without hearing from them, and then dad woke me up in the middle of the night.
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