Never pass up an opportunity for show-and-tell. I've posted this gun before in various threads, but I recently came across the letter and noticed its 100th shipping anniversary was coming up.
Regulation Police 38, #4301, shipped on September 15, 1917.
The letter calls it the "Pre-World War I Variation"; a bit of a misnomer if you ask me, as there were millions of people, many of them quite dead already, who'd probably quibble with calling anything from 1917 "pre-war"
. Ever in the narrower US context, almost all of these guns were produced and shipped after the US entered the war on April 6. Anyway, enough nitpicks.
This gun came from the estate of Spencer T. Olin, one of the sons of Franklin Olin, who founded Western Catridge Company, acquired Winchester in the 1930s to form Winchester-Western, and finally Olin Corp. in 1944.
The evidence for this provenance was circumstantial (the seller had another gun from the same source which was convincingly documented to Olin), so I paid only a reasonable price for the gun and got the story for free. I was pleasantly surprised when I lettered it and got confirmation for the Olin connection; the gun did ship to Western Cartridge Co., and then apparently somehow ended up in the private possession of the owner's family. Spencer Olin worked as an executive for the company his entire career, so there was lots of opportunity.
100 Years Ago: Regulation Police 38
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