Help with 29-1 Historical Letter

[444 Magnum]

I got my letter yesterday from the S&W Historical Foundation on my 6.5" 29-1. It confirmed the model and configuration. It was sent to a distributor in Miami in 1962. I've sent the pertinent information to J. C. Elect.

The typed invoice has the company name as S. G. Keep Wholesale while the handwritten list of serial numbers appears to be S.G. Key's Wholesale.

Does anyone have knowledge of this distributor and the correct name of the company?

I'd like to document the correct spelling and, if needed, the letter. My gut tells me "Key's" is correct but I haven't found anything under either name.

Thanks for any help.

 

[Truckman]

The address is now a beauty salon...Could the SG have stood for Sargent & Greenleaf?...That would account for "keys"... ...Ben

 

[Wiregrassguy]

I think the hand written name is also Keep. The second e and the p are somewhat scribbled.

 

[DV0]

To me that looks like keep, no tail on the “s” if it was spelled keys, and the questionable “ e”matches the one in “whole”. I would think the invoice would be more accurate than a hand written serial ledger probably based on invoices imo.

 

[444 Magnum]

Guy,
It's written exactly the same way on page two of the serial number list. No loop on the second "E" .



I'm hoping someone else has had a pistol lettered to them and can confirm either way.

 

[Doc44]

It is definitely S. G. Keep Wholesale. I checked several invoices and serial number lists to be certain. The word Keep is written the same way on all the serial number lists.

Bill

 

[ordnanceguy]

.444 Magnum:

That's a stumper. I am a Miami native and have lived here all my life. I have never heard of Keys or Keep Wholesale.

However, I ran a corporate record search for you and found that back in the early 1960s (a time of tremendous change in Miami with the Cuban Missile Crisis, Bay of Pigs, Cuban refugees, etc.) there was an entity known as "Keys Wholesale Electric Supply, Inc." It was dissolved in 1967. I could not find any additional corporate records available online. See attached that I retrieved for you from the state's corporate record website.

Note that "Keys" might possibly refer to the nearby Florida Keys.

Nothing came up on S. G. Keep or Keep Wholesale.

I am out of clues and hand the baton back to you. Good luck.

Regards,
Charlie

 

[444 Magnum]

Thank you, Bill.

Interesting also, the serial number (S229816) wasn't in the shipping logs. Mike found it doing an invoice search.

 

[444 Magnum]

Thanks for looking Charlie. If Bill's records show it as "Keep" on several occasions, I'll go with that. I thought perhaps it was a clerical error like the shipping log omission.

 

[Doc44]

The beauty of digitized and indexed records is you can do a search by serial number and not only by shipping date and location. Sometimes you get lucky and find the gun being researched. S&W included serial number lists beginning in 1958 so guns shipping in this year and later can sometimes be found even though there is no entry in the shipping log.

The invoices for S. G. Keep Wholesale date from 1957 through 1962 so perhaps the company went out of business over 60 years ago.

Bill

 

[444 Magnum]

Here's the pistol. I've posted it before, but you can't have a 29-1 thread without a picture. I bought it in 2012 but just got around to lettering it.

 

[Kansasgunner]

I have a two inch Model 10 that also shipped to S.G. Keep, Inc. in Miami. The letter is one of Jean Jinks calligraphy letters that she did at the Spokane, WA Symposium.

 

[444 Magnum]

Very nice Tim. Thank you. Is the engraver known?

 

[Kansasgunner]

The engraver is unknown. It shipped plain blue.

 

[SWSC]

keep

 

[SWSC]

keep

 

[444 Magnum]

Here's a copy of the invoice. No handcuffs listed but it was 103 pistols.
SWSC, do you have the exact date in 1962 of the article in the Miami Herald?
I appreciate all the documentation. I'm going to copy this to a file to keep with the pistol.

 

[SWSC]

04 04 1962