victorio1sw
Bearcat
I think Ruger gives us all they've got.
Yours looks like most of the letters I've gotten from them.
Once I got a 2nd letter, attached to the "standard" letter. The 2nd one explained how or why my gun had an "S" following the serial number.
Using Newspapers.com, I was not able to find a later ad for W. A. L. Thompson Hdwe. I did find one ad that mentioned a branch location at Dodge City.Is this Hardware store still in business I wonder ? So this #93 wasn't a "subscription" gun, as a lot of early production guns were , as I was led to believe ?? It's nice to know when it was made and obviously shipped right out to the hardware store in Topeka KS. To me it makes me wonder more if the store owner bought it for himself or he just bought it for resale to some customer ? And I wonder where it's been for the last 70 plus years ??? Again I wonder if it was in this guy's family or just been bouncing around from collector to collector all this time ? Who the heck knows or if they even want to say or talk about it. To me it's intriguing. I wonder if Contender and quite a few others are thinking a spacer should go on those grips, as one would not want those to crack for sure ....then again, it may just sit in a box in a safe right now. Who knows? But interesting.
I have no idea who owned this #93 in the past.
But as for your other question about who really bought it. I would say that 99% of the time a hardware store would buy a gun at some customer's request. Only if it was a very popular gun, and wouldn't sit in inventory long, a larger hardware store might buy it with no customer in mind.