firecaptain said:
Mtneer said:
Thanks single action. The wife and I just might run down there tomorrow for something to do. We're in Idaho, but not all that far north of the Utah border. We go down to Smith and Edwards, and then swing over through Logan and back home every once in a while.
Ahh, Smith and Edwards. Brings back memories when I was stationed at Hill AFB. Great area.
Ha! That's kind of funny 6gun and firecaptain. What I knew of as a kid as being the "Army/Navy Surplus Store" (Smith and Edwards) seems to have become quite the icon.
I was born in Burley, Idaho. But when I was 7 or 8 we moved down to Ogden, Utah for a few years because Dad found work as a Boiler Operator at Hill AFB.
I'm not sure, but I think Dad bought a Remington 30-06 (I don't remember the model) at Smith and Edwards. One gun I definitely remember him buying in that store was a rifle he pulled out of a barrel full of them sitting at the end of an aisle. It was covered in what I thought was thick black grease. Nowadays I'd guess that "thick black grease" was probably Cosmoline. I remember Dad taking that ugly rifle home, cleaning it up, and sort of "sporterizing" it by cutting off the front part of the stock. Then he cut the buttstock off, sanded it down, varnished it, and installed a recoil pad. Dad had someone else install a scope on the gun before giving it to Mom as her "deer rifle."
I don't remember if Mom actually killed any deer with that rifle or not. But I remember this for sure; when I was 15 years old, Lee Harvey Oswald
reportedly used a 6.5 Carcano just like my Mom's "deer rifle" to shoot JFK. At 15 years old, that fact was a source of pride for me. Yeah, I know – it was kind of a twisted sort of pride. Nevertheless, I WAS proud that my Mom had a rifle like Oswald's. I didn't know how common those 6.5 Carcano rifles were back then. And I sure didn't know just how common it was for them to have been pulled from a barrel full of them at an Army/Navy Surplus Store.
