Wildey’s Here: The Survivor

By Wildey Moore

“Wildey’s Here” is the true story of Wildey Moore’s seven decades on the gun business. It charts how, without a college education, Moore became a great innovator, designing not only the first gas-operated pistol, the Survivor, but also the JAWS, Justice Pistol for the King of Jordan. The book further recounts, how, while, recovering from a stroke, international players including former CIA members attempted to seize Moore’s then multi-national business, but his faith in God gave him the strength to hold on to fight and wim back the company he had built over forty years.

While “Wildey’s Here” is a story of survival, it’s also the story of how a man came to trust in the Lord during the most trying time of his life, and charts the changes Wildey witnessed in the United States as the country forsook morality and embraced immorality, starting down the road to decline.

Make America great again, no,
MAKE AMERICA GOOD AGAIN.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781728331614

Wildey Moore

Wildey J. Moore is a gun industry legend, best known for designing the Wildey Survivor and JAWS, Justice Pistols. He has worked in the gun business since the 1950’s, starting in the parts department of Stoeger Arms in Long Island City, NY, later becoming Winchester Repeating Arms’ youngest outside sales representative before working for the National Defense Works (FFV) in Sweden, afterward designing and taking to production his Survivor pistol, which led to his work designing and manufacturing JAWS, Justice pistol, for King Abdullah of Jordan. His pistols have been featured in several movies including Death Wish III starring Charles Bronson. He is now a consultant for his former company and other companies and lives with his wife in Connecticut.

Book preview

WILDEY’S

HERE

THE SURVIVOR

WILDEY MOORE

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AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: [phone]

© 2019 Wildey Moore. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 10/14/2019

ISBN: 978-1-7283-3160-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-3161-4 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

DEDICATION

"Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil.

Proverbs 31:10-11

This book is dedicated to Linda Moore, my wife, best friend, business partner, and, after my stroke, nurse. You fired the first shots from the prototype Survivor and, over the years, you’ve been like a pillar of iron during the greatest trials of my life, even until today. It’s been some ride hasn’t it honey.

And to my children, Willie, Cathy, Frankie, Hal and Tina, sons and daughters that endured their father all these years. As I’ve written this book, I’ve found many things I would have done differently. I hope this book will explain my life, and my actions. I love you all dearly and pray for you always.

I would also like to mention Linda’s children, Heidi and Wendy, who have remained close to their mother in both thought and action all these years.

Wildey Moore

Connecticut

Summer, 2018

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION   GREEN DOT

CHAPTER 1     BROOKLYN

CHAPTER 2     STOEGER ARMS

CHAPTER 3     ARGAMONTE

CHAPTER 4     WINCHESTER

CHAPTER 5     GUN COMPARISONS, GOVERNMENT INCOMPETENCE, & NUMRICH ARMS

CHAPTER 6     H&R, SELLING SUMMERTIME RIOTS, & INVESTMENT CASTING

CHAPTER 7     J.J. TOBLER

CHAPTER 8     FORENADE FABRIKVERKEN

CHAPTER 9     WILDEY FIREARMS

CHAPTER 10   AROUND THE COUNTRY

CHAPTER 11   PROTOTYPE

CHAPTER 12   CIRCUS CIRCUS

PHOTO GALLERY

CHAPTER 13   DEATH WISH III AND THE .475 MAGNUM

CHAPTER 14   LAWSUIT

CHAPTER 15   BUSINESS & RELIGION

CHAPTER 16   BUSINESS & RELIGION PART II

CHAPTER 17   MARCONI

CHAPTER 18   THE PRINCE

CHAPTER 19   DARTH VADER’S PLACE

CHAPTER 20   KING ABDULLAH

CHAPTER 21   DON’T GET TOO CLOSE

CHAPTER 22   THE VIPER

CHAPTER 23   THE ORDEAL

CHAPTER 24   THREE BLIND MICE

CHAPTER 25   THE BREAKING POINT

CHAPTER 26   SUING THE KING

EPILOGUE

POSTSCRIPT

INTRODUCTION

GREEN DOT

What’s that green dot on your forehead? She asked.

My wife, Linda, and I sat playing dominoes at our kitchen table in Connecticut. It was late September 2009. The leaves outside had yellowed but hadn’t yet fallen and still hung thick enough to shield our house from the road. Ours was a hard driveway to spot at night unless you already knew where it was.

Linda and I were doing our best to relax, trying to momentarily forget the treachery we found ourselves the target of the last several years. The duplicity came to a head a few days prior when I was fired from my own company. The call to fire me most likely came from Jordan, from the King’s advisor, Moayad Samman, who had inserted himself into the business after King Abdullah, my partner and friend, had turned his focus to the war in Iraq then raging on his border. After seeing the devastation of the Arab Spring, I can sympathize with the King’s situation.

There wasn’t anything we could do about the termination now but bring a lawsuit, which would then bring our plight to the King’s attention. And that’s what we were planning, which is exactly what Samman and his henchman wanted to avoid. The whole mess stayed on my mind despite my best attempts to forget. I’m sure Linda was thinking about our circumstances too then, but neither of us mentioned them as we placed our dominoes onto the table.

That’s when Linda looked up at me. What’s that green dot on your forehead? she asked.

I raised my hand to my brow to see it reflect the green light of a laser now coming in through the kitchen window from the road at the top of my driveway. When I recognized the laser for what it was, I grabbed my cane and stood from the chair as quickly as I could on somewhat shaky legs, weakened by a stroke.

A black truck sat stopped in the street about thirty-five yards from my kitchen in the darkness of our country road, only partially visible behind shrubs. As I made out the silhouette I spotted where the source of the green laser had come from.

The man must have parked the pickup with his lights out, in the perfect position to see between bushes and at just the right angle to catch a glimpse of my lighted kitchen window. But as I made out the silhouette of the truck the driver revved the engine and tore off into the crisp fall night, turning on his lights only as he got farther down the road.

I’m quite sure I knew who the pick-up truck belonged to. Most likely he was one of the former Blackwater operatives who took jobs at Wildey FA as Samman came to administer the partnership when HM (His Majesty) stepped away under the pressures of his job.

I have no doubt too that the man behind the laser knew how to use a gun. What a mercenary knew about manufacturing firearms I couldn’t tell you. But after seeing how he dealt with me and my wife, and how he, along with a former CIA agent, worked to throw our enterprise into disarray, while making millions of the King’s dollars disappear with nothing in return, I venture to guess that his primary function didn’t have anything to do with building and selling guns at all.

The goal was to wrestle the company away from this old gun maker from rural Connecticut and his wife, and do with it what they wanted. We have invoices stating that they were taking large weapons orders from the Kurds, and filling out paperwork with the US State Department that valued the linked Jordanian and American companies at sixty-five million dollars. But they wouldn’t sell a gun until they moved me from my ownership stake, by force or by fraud. And I had recently suffered a stroke, and was recovering, which made it even more difficult to fight their onslaught. I further derived my income from my company which they saw fit to fire me from. In other words, I didn’t even have the money to fight.

I’ve been in the gun business in one form or another since the 1950s. I worked in parts’ departments, in the Air National Guard, on sales teams, as a gunsmith, a re-loader; I’ve started businesses, designed and built pistols, and run for political office; I’ve even failed more than a few times. The one thing I haven’t done is quit. And I wasn’t planning on quitting now, though I knew I was up against greater odds than I had ever faced, recovering from a stroke, in an immoral America that had drifted so far from the country I was raised to love that I hardly knew where I stood anymore. But I was up to the fight. I knew that if I would stand, then God would stand with me.

When I went into business with King Abdullah of Jordan I thought it was an opportunity to design a new handgun, and to establish a center for manufacturing in Jordan. Instead, I learned how treacherous the mix of royal politics with international realpolitik and the immorality of the new American paradigm really is.

We live in a more dangerous world than our fathers could ever have imagined. And we came to this point in such a short span of time that my head practically spins. In one sense the gun industry has mirrored the changes in the country as it shifted from an industry that primarily sold guns used for hunting and sporting, which reflected the mentality of the gun buying public of the time, to an industry that sells guns designed for self-defense and offense: a change that reflects the fear and anxiety of the people.

What follows is my story: how I got into the industry, how I learned to design my own pistols, and how I got into this problem with the Jordanians and with the American mercenaries. Along the way I express some of my opinions on policing, firearms, politics, and God, and where I’ve seen America going in my lifetime.

I think in its own way, you might find what I’ve seen and done interesting, and that it might be of some value in the future.

After my stroke, Linda and I endured nine years of what we call hell. In that time, we had the choice of either strengthening our faith in the Lord or falling away. We came to learn that there’s always light at the end of the tunnel if you can keep faith.

What follows is also a testament to that.

CHAPTER 1

BROOKLYN

I carried a small .22 caliber rifle slung over my shoulder onto the packed trolley car on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, New York. My friends Bradley Anderson, and George Egholm walked on with me. We headed for the end of the line, for the fields in Canarsie that ran out to the marshes and to Sheepshead Bay . The New York, Air National Guard also had a base out there named Floyd Bennet Field, which they used during the unconstitutional war in Korea to ferry planes out to Asia. I remember seeing F-80’S, F-84’S and other planes there. Later, when I joined the National Guard myself I flew from that field as a gunner in a B-26.

My father had given me the .22 rifle I now carried for my fourteenth birthday. These were the days when fathers gave sons .22s for presents. Naturally they expected their children wouldn’t hurt themselves or anybody else, and had already taught them enough to trust them. For that matter, those were the days when a fourteen-year-old boy could enter a Brooklyn trolley car carrying a rifle without the passengers inside suspecting he was a crazed high school student entering to start another massacre. Instead the passengers all just figured I was going to the end of the line to plink and shoot rabbits, or they didn’t think anything at all.

People had never heard of a school shooter, or even imagined that such a thing was possible then, even in all the stories of the so-called Wild West. In other words, they didn’t view my rifle as a threat to them or to anybody else because people seldom turned their guns upon each other, and never did so randomly and indiscriminately. Try doing that now and you’ll make national news and meet the SWAT Teams armed with hair trigger weapons and trained in tactics designed for the military.

My father used to take me and my little brother out to Canarsie on weekends to shoot. The time we spent plinking, however, wasn’t enough for me, I wanted to shoot as much as possible.

We used to set up bottles and cans, or whatever targets we could find, with the salt marsh as the backdrop and shoot away. .22 caliber ammunition was cheap and money had real value then, which let us have fun as a family without going into debt to do it. We weren’t alone in the marshes plinking cans and shooting rabbits either. It seemed a fair portion of Brooklynites did the same thing then. Way before my time, the city even passed a law forbidding trolley car passengers from shooting rabbits off the moving trolley. You had to at least wait to get off to shoot.

Dad didn’t find plinking as interesting as I did, though. I think he took me out to Canarsie because he knew how much I enjoyed the sport. We had gone out, as far as I could remember, since I was nine-years-old, but I went there on my own as soon as I was allowed.

In those marshes off Jamaica Bay, I not only acquired a lifelong joy for shooting, but also a love and respect for firearms. I emphasize the respect part of that equation, because to be able to handle a firearm at all, not to mention to take public transportation with one, you need to have a level of responsibility that many people find hard to believe children once possessed, or that adults now even have.

As we grew older, my friend Bradley and I bypassed the Flatbush Avenue Trolley altogether for our motorcycles, which we bought as soon as we were able, even a little bit before. I owned a 51 Indian 80 and Bradley rode a BMW. We put the rifles in satchels on the front of the bikes and rode out to the marshes together to shoot.

As it was, we still had cause to use the Flatbush Avenue trolleys from time to time since my friend, George Eghlom had worked at acquiring a set of fuses for them. In those days the trolleys didn’t run using keys, instead when the conductors stopped they simply pulled the fuses out and took them with them. Getting your hands on a set of fuses meant that you could turn a trolley car on, if you were so inclined.

One Sunday afternoon the three of us were so inclined, and took a trolley car out of the yard and drove it all the way down Flatbush Avenue on our own. We even stopped to pick up passengers as we went. George was dead pan about it as the people entered the car, but Bradley and I did all we could to keep from laughing. At the last stop George pulled his fuse out and the three of us ran off the car, leaving the people to find their own way home on an abandoned trolley.

I never said we were angels.

At that time, I also shot on the Midwood High School rifle team.

I venture to guess that Midwood no longer allows such a team to exist. If they did, students certainly wouldn’t come to school carrying their rifles and stow them in their own lockers. What seems now like an open opportunity for theft and violence, and a psych evaluation ordered by the Board of Ed., at that time was taken as a matter of course, and a safe one at that.

The children in Midwood grew up in families and weren’t raised by first-person shooter video games that help desensitize them to killing others. It strikes me that the government and many misguided Americans are for gun bans while at the same time supporting and allowing their children to participate in what Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman calls, Murder Simulators – i.e. video games that prepare young minds to kill. There used to be a general sense that immorality was more dangerous than material objects. Now we blame things for the actions of people.

In that innocent time, the awful changes I’ve seen over the years were so far off as to seem impossible, unthinkable – even now I wonder how we could have let this happen. To me and to everyone I knew, a gun was just a gun. I loved and love to shoot. I had no desire to shoot someone outside of a wartime scenario and never met anyone who did. My love of shooting never led me to violent behavior, in fact quite the opposite: my love of shooting led me to want to gain a mechanical understanding of how guns worked, and later to take them apart and to fix them.

In pursuit of my hobby, I set up a shop in the basement of my family’s house eight blocks off Flatbush Avenue on 39th Street. The shop started small with a drill press, a radial arm saw, and hand tools. If I needed better equipment for a job, or something was beyond me, then I headed to Bob and Ray’s Meteor Arms on Flatbush Avenue. The gunsmith there, Bob, if I remember correctly, was set up with a nice shop where he spent his time doing the same things I would be doing in a more sophisticated manner.

At first I just tinkered, but then I got serious as I got better and people began to look to me for gunsmithing. With some friends, I began converting old war surplus rifles into what they called sporters, these were in-fashion then, and were not much more than military rifles converted for civilian needs. We did this in most cases by exchanging the beat up stocks of the surplus rifles for higher quality walnut ones. We changed the sights to something that simply looked more presentable.

I also bought, sold and traded firearms. These were all perfectly innocent and respectable behaviors then. I further started making money trading and selling my friends’ firearms. One guy I knew, Alvin Myman, sold me his family’s old Remington Civil War revolvers, which they no longer wanted. I traded them off for something else and turned around and made a profit on them. Another friend’s older brother who served in WWII had sent back a 9MM German Schmeisser MP40 Sub-Machine by mail from Germany, still in its wooden box from the war. The family had been sitting on it ever since he came home, and this was the late 50’S. It didn’t take a genius to read what was in the Box. Even if you couldn’t read German, you understood the instructions.

I bought that MP40 and turned around and sold that gun for a profit as well. I was getting good at trading, and in the course of time I picked up a German Solothurn MP34 machine gun, a Finnish Suomi and others.

A policeman named Bob Sebach, God rest his soul, sold me a Russian sub machine gun. Who knows what I did with them all. I probably later destroyed those guns in fear of the law. Whatever the case was for each particular gun, one thing was for sure, I was gaining a firm understanding of the way different firearms worked, or didn’t work, which would greatly serve me later on down the line.

As to business, I conducted so much of it out of my basement shop that by the end of high school, I applied for and acquired a Federal Firearms License (FFL), which allowed me to purchase firearms wholesale instead of retail. The FFL cost $5.00 and could be acquired through the mail.

The training I got then also helped dictate the course I took as the Korean Conflict began taking shape.

At that time, I had purchased a used 1951 Indian 80 Police Bike from Carl’s Motorcycle Shop in Brooklyn, NY. Carl – all five-foot-five of him – smelled like a combination of engine oil and gas that was lovely to my nose. You never saw Carl or his brother without a stogie in their faces and grease and grime all over them. The brothers knew motorcycles and how to fix them, especially the old Indians they picked up at police auctions in Queens.

The German NSU I owned previous to the Indian had burned oil terribly. But if the cops couldn’t see me in all that smoke then they couldn’t catch me. My father and I had rebuilt that NSU together, but that was back when I was fourteen, when I was still smoking my way out to Canarsie to shoot, but in three years the NSU had outlived its usefulness. The bike had been worth every penny. I only paid a hundred dollars for it then, all money I had earned delivering newspapers. In time, I’d spend considerably more on the Indian at three hundred and fifty dollars, money I came to earn on my trip to boot camp. An Indian, however, was a much better bike. Leather saddle bags, crash bars, two spot lights but no electric starter.

It was 1953 when I graduated high school, and our government had been fighting in Korea in an undeclared war since 1950. I didn’t know, or care, much about the world at that time, or about politics and government. I only knew that, as an American, I was taken in by our propaganda, which told me that I was supposed to fight the enemy. My friends and I felt gung-ho to join the war and to kill the gooks, as we were taught to say back then. So in this fighting spirit Bradley and I and a couple other friends, drove down to Floyd Bennett Field near where we used to go plinking and signed up for the New York Air National Guard together. We didn’t know that the war was about to end, much to the dismay of the Military Industrial Complex (MIC). In hindsight, however, that war’s end probably served me better than fighting.

I signed up for the draft in the middle of my senior year of high school. When school ended, I rode out to Syracuse and to boot camp. I remember thinking that boot camp was something that I just had to endure.

At that time, I dreamed of becoming a bomber pilot, but the New York Air National Guard (NYANG) had a different idea and made me a gunner on a B-26.

I later become a weapon’s mechanic. When the officers learned that I already had a strong working knowledge of firearms and how they ope- rated, they sent me to Colorado’s Lowry Air Force base just outside of Denver in Aurora for weapons’ training. There I became an AB46250 weapons’ mechanic. I learned, officially, how to work on all the firearms I might encounter in the Air National Guard from the 1911 .45 autos’s right on up to 20 and 30mm cannons, and everything in between from M1 Garands, M1 and M2 Carbines, sub machine guns, .50s, .30s, M39s, M24s, you name it. We even learned to work on Grease Guns, which was a horrible gun, used by tank commanders, paratroopers and pilots. These things were designed to use car parts to save on tooling. Up until ’45 and the Grease Gun we never had a sub-machine gun. Some units had Thompson or Reising sub-machine guns, but there weren’t too many around.

If a weapon was mounted to an airplane or a soldier carried it, then the folks at Lowry trained us to take it apart and to fix it.

After Lowry, I returned to Brooklyn, and when they didn’t have us strafing Plum Island off Gardner’s Bay on Long Island, I fixed the officer’s weapons. Once it got around that I could fix any firearm out there, the men started coming to me to work on their personal pieces.

I started to specialize in .45s and M1 Garands, mostly because every officer carried a .45 and the men used the M1 Garand for match shooting. In both cases they wanted to have accurate weapons.

I drove out to Indian Point for Guard service one weekend a month, so I didn’t have enough time to fix all the guns while I was on duty. Instead, I brought the weapons back with me to my home shop in my mother’s house and fixed them there. After I finished, I either waited a few weeks to return the weapons or I dropped the guns off at Floyd Bennett Field on my ’51 Indian.

The Military M1911 .45s had an excellent and well-deserved reputation for reliability, as well as stopping power. They were also known for jams and stove-piping, which occurs when the spent case gets stuck in the pistol’s ejection port. This occurred on many occasions because of the way in which the military taught their men to shoot. At that time, they taught you to stand sideways, which made you a smaller target, and to fire the weapon with one hand. The problem with this style of shooting was that it tended to cause the weapon to jam. Unless you fired the M1911 with a rigid arm, the backward recoil of your own arm robbed the gun of the energy it needed to bring the slide completely rearward to fully extract the spent cartridge. Currently, the military generally teaches their soldiers and marines to fire their pistols from a crouched position with both hands on the gun, which solves the problem.

The M1 Garands had even fewer problems. I used to sight them in. Sometimes the gas system had certain difficulties, but the US Government issued new cylinders which made them almost trouble free afterward. The only problem I consistently encountered with the M1s was slop where the metal barrel fit into the wood stock which affected the gun’s accuracy. Sometimes we used fiberglass where the wood received the metal to give it as tight and true a fit as possible.

I spent almost no time working on the M1 Carbines because nobody used those for matches, and so they cared little how accurate they were. However, I did get familiar with the carbine, a gun which has an interesting footnote. In ‘62 I worked at Winchester just after David Marshal Williams left. Williams was better known as Carbine Williams and had a movie of the same name made after him. He designed some of the parts on Winchester’s M1 Carbine while still incarcerated for murder in North Carolina. They said he shot a Sheriff’s Deputy when they raided his bootlegging still. The old timers at Winchester said Carbine Williams didn’t talk much, but that he had a short fuse, especially when he had a few shots of bourbon in him. For protection he always carried two nickel plated .45s.

Those were different days.

CHAPTER 2

STOEGER ARMS

After Boot Camp I got a job on Wall Street, working for a brokerage firm called Kidder, Peabody & Co. It was a kid’s job. I rolled tubs of IBM punch cards around in carts. I’m sure the cards showed ownership of some sort. All I had to do was move them from one place to another, I don’t know the details. I do know the job was terribly boring, and I had no desire to learn any further what they did in that place. I got much more satisfaction rebuilding motorcycle engines, or taking apart .45 automa- tics. Even the men who seemed to hold sway over the office didn’t appeal to me. I couldn’t relate with what they were doing.

My mother knew that I was unhappy working at that White Shoe firm.

You like guns so much, she said, why don’t you see if you can get a job in the gun business. Speaking of my mother, we used to burn coal, and had a coal bin in the basement which we would shoot into for fun.

The simple suggestion she made about my entering the gun business would chart my life’s work. I already worked with guns as a side job, and had gotten training at Lowry AFB from the Air Force. Making my way into the gun industry sounded like the best plan.

So I did the most reasonable thing I could think of. I made a call to Stoeger Arms and asked if they would consider hiring me. I was already familiar with Stoeger’s through their Shooter’s Bible where they sold nearly everything pertaining to commercial and police firearms, from gun parts and sights to rifles and handguns, and everything in between. They specialized in selling European guns to the American market and had the exclusive right to sell many of the European guns here like the Stoeger Luger, Mannlicher rifles, and Sauer shotguns.

I knew that Stoeger had a store on Park Avenue in Manhattan because I had been there once or twice before. It was a beautiful store too, with hundreds of expensive guns and decorated to make you feel like you’d gone somewhere outside the city. Just having entered the building you could imagine you’d taken a trip to Alaska or to Africa or anywhere else you might dream about.

Their retail store was a far cry from my local gun shop on Flatbush Avenue. Sections of the walls were covered with real trophies from around the world from water buffaloes, to lions, leopards, tigers, elephants’ feet, bears; the list of exotic animals went on and on. I was told that different Stoeger family members shot the animals.

Robert Stack was a regular there, and from time to time Hemingway showed up, probably when he was in town to meet with his editor, when he wasn’t over at Abercrombie. For me and many others, Stoeger Arms was famous. It was only natural that I try working for them first. I could always try somewhere else if it didn’t work out.

I found their number in the book and called over to the parts department in Long Island City. A man named Jack Meehan answered. I said to Mr. Meehan, I’m interested in getting into the firearms industry.

From there, he asked me a bit about myself and then invited me down to the warehouse and the parts department later in the week.

I still recall the address: 45-18 Court House Square, Long Island City, New York.

I took the elevated subway to Long Island City from Brooklyn. When I got to the parts department, they gave me the grand tour, and led me into the massive warehouse where they shipped all the guns, parts, and accessories for their catalogue business. I felt exhilarated behind the scenes walking through rows and rows of guns and parts. The way I felt that day, they could have paid me to work in the parts department. As it turned out, they hired me a few weeks later to work in the distribution section of that department in the warehouse, which paid the vast sum of twelve dollars a week. It was very little even back then when money still had value, but, like I said, they could have paid me to work there, and I was living at home, and gas cost twenty-six cents a gallon, so money wasn’t that important.

I worked at Stoeger for the next five years under Al Otto who was one of the only other people beside myself who spoke English. Everybody else spoke German (except for the Hungarian gunsmith) but between their broken English and my broken German we managed to communicate just fine. I’ll never forget that one of the workers was in the Battle of the Bulge from the German side. It was interesting to talk to him about what happened. They say history is written by the winners, I’ve found that’s true.

Something else I learned pretty quickly was that the company name was not pronounced Stoeger as in, Stowe-ger, but Stee-ger. It was a German company after all.

In the beginning I worked pulling parts’ orders. This didn’t entail doing too much more than I had done for Kidder, Peabody & Co, but at least I was working with something real that you could hold in your hand and that served a function – not promises on paper punched out of an early computer.

Working at Stoeger’s had the added benefit of familiarizing me with the parts that made the guns function. In many cases without ever having seen how that particular firearm worked, I could envision what a certain part did and how. I also got a good impression of how certain parts from some companies wore out and/or broke and why they did so. For instance, we sold Marlin 336s of which the Winchester 94 was the direct competitor.

For every Marlin sold, we sold ten Winchesters. And while we rarely sold a replacement firing pin for the Winchester 94, we had to buy the Marlin 336 firing pins in lots of 50 to keep up with demand, as they broke so often.

I wondered what the problem with the Marlin firing pins could be. Our Hungarian gunsmith cleared the question up for me when he explained that the Marlin’s firing pins were too hard; that they had a bad heat treatment. I was starting to see how even the different techniques used to manufacture different parts could affect the way they performed in the guns, and this would be valuable information for me to have and to understand down the road as I began to manufacture on my own.

Or take the case of the Savage 24 shotgun, which we sold seemingly millions of, and yet we also sold a raft of barrel selectors for them, which tended to break more often on Savages than on other shotguns.

The nose on the hammer on some Smith & Wesson N frame and K frame revolvers would also break off with frequency. The material was too hard and brittle or case hardened. On several occasions, new alloys came onto the market that posed different kinds of problems: too hard, too soft, too porous, too expensive or hard to manufacture. S&W brought out the new stainless steel Model 60 revolver they had been working on. They used an alloy called 17-4 in its production. That material made for a nice revolver, but after they brought the product to market they learned that it was simply too costly to manufacture and so they discontinued the line, only