RM Vivas
US Veteran
This is going to be another stupidly long image heavy post but I’m hoping you’ll think it’s worth it.
Cruising gun auction sites at 0300 is getting to be expensive and addictive. How else can I explain why I have –5—S&W M36-1’s that letter as NYPD guns?
It’s getting to the point now where when I am cruising the gun sites I don’t bid on an NYPD gun unless:
• The price is right
• It is an upgrade (condition, box & docs, engraved, etc.)
• It comes back to a famous person or event
I recently picked up a new addition to the RM Vivas Home for Wayward NYPD Problem-Solving Equipment.
As most you have seen (and can easily search), whenever I pick up a new gun I do a little write up with photos of it. Most of the time this write-up is fairly straight forward but I’ve been thinking lately that those write-ups are getting a bit boring/redundant.
I decided that for this gun I would do a start-to-finish sort of thing that shows how I find these guns and, I think most importantly, how I document them.
The search process usually starts with me being fairly bored at work and hitting the gun auction sites. No real surprise there, as I think most of us do that.
I’ll search for NYPD stuff usually by searching for gun name. You can search NYPD but you’ll get back all kinds of junk although a couple of NYPD guns will pop up. Usually though, because the seller knows (or thinks they know) they are NYPD guns, they’ll try to ask a premium. How else do you explain a plain Jane M64 NY-1 4-inch SB going for five grand or a 2-inch RB M64-NY-1 going for $2,500?
With the more esoteric stuff it’s fairly easy. I’ll do a search for Terrier and since there are not that many, maybe a dozen will turn up. I’ll pull up the ads, note the serial numbers and then run the numbers through my NYPD records.
This is where I have an advantage that no one else really has; I have copies of the surviving NYPD purchase and sales records. Does it give me an unfair advantage? Yes. Did I earn it? Absolutely. Do you know how many boxes of Dunkin’ Donuts I had to schlepp down to the Equipment Bureau with to schmooze my way past the very loosely and poorly defined limits of my letter of introduction? I spent literally thousands of hours acquiring and transcribing the records. As you’ll see a little further down, I then used those records as a springboard to find and confirm other records and construct my own databases to make it easier to gather info.
Annoyingly, most folks don’t list the guns serial number in their ad copy. I usually look at all the photos first and if I don’t see the serial number in the photos, I’ll check the ad copy. If it isn’t in the ad copy I’ll send a message to the seller that says “Greetings, Can you provide a s/n for this gun? I am looking for ones from a specific contract. Best, RM Vivas” Most people are good enough to respond. I’ll then run the s/n through my records and see if it’s a hit or not.
One exception to this, and it applies with this marvelous little gun, is when the image shows a shield number stamped on the gun. One day I’m going to do a detailed photo-heavy post just on shield stampings. In this case, the auction photos showed the shield stamping and that was good enough for me.
So, I’m looking at search results for “Wesson M&P” and this pops up:
(obviously, it wasn’t tagged SOLD at the time; the images are from after the auction closed)
OK, a nice little 4-inch S-Series M&P. Normally I’ll see a few of these and give them a pass but this one jumped out at me because, at the time I came across it, the bid was rather low and I thought the gun in rather good condition.
My interest having been piqued; I decide to review some of the seller’s other images:
This image is what got me going; note numbers that appear to be stamped on the backstrap. My experience tells me that that is a shield stamping. Now I’m definitely interested. I keep going and find the seller has conveniently provided a nice image of the serial number:
S812894
Not only is this a likely NYPD gun, it is a delightfully close serial number to the traditionally ‘last V-Series’ gun, V811,119.
The ad copy is short and not really very detailed:
“…Showing finish wear mostly on some of the edges/high spots. Numbers matching except for the grips. 4 inch barrel with a sharp, shiny bore in very good condition. Smooth action, operates as it should. Please refer to the photos, and judge for yourself. Stock number 24/09/0309…”
As is usually the case with these types of guns, the seller did not think the shield numbers were worth mentioning in the ad copy. I see that a lot and I think it is because the sellers feel that putting them in the ad copy is basically them saying “Hey, someone defaced this gun with a bunch of numbers; don’t use that as a bargaining point for a lower price”.
Now I have to look up the serial numbers.
First I go to the spreadsheet the lists every serial number in the paper records. It took me -years- to get them all typed in. I open the spreadsheet for S-series guns, All Done – M&P V_S, and find this entry:
According to my notes, the record of this gun appears in Book 42-46 page 139 and shows a sales date of 03JUN46.
There was a time when the next step would be to go to the paper records and sort through those:
Since discovering that the massive and overpriced copier next to my office at work can scan a few hundred pages at hi-res onto a thumb drive in less time than it takes to steal a case of copy paper, I scanned all the paper records into .pdf files to make my life much easier!
I open the scanned copy of the paper records, Book 42-46, and flip to page 139 and find this:
Serial number matches, shield number looks like it matches too.
Having identified the gun as NYPD the next question is do I bid it? In this instance the gun checked off two boxes of the three I listed earlier: it’s in much better shape than the other S-series gun I have now and the price is right. Actually, I think the price is pretty damn good! I think anytime you can score a nice mid-century M&P for less than four bills you should grab it.
I waited for the auction to end, confirmed my being high bidder, got a final bill and shipped out payment and FFL.
A word about the final bill; even though the screwing is nowhere near as severe as one would get at a major auction house (looking at you Julias and RIA) the fees and taxes do add up. This gun closed at $382, a good price! Then there is a %3 surcharge for credit card (+$11.46), shipping (+$30.00), government extortion charge/taxes (+$33.88) and fees (?) (+$3.82). This brings the grand total for my $382 revolver to $461.16. My FFL does my transfers on the arm, otherwise this would be pushing half a G!!
Still, it’s a nice gun, not an outrageous price, it is in better condition than the S-series gun I have now and it’ll letter both through my records and the factory so…..
The gun arrives at my FFL and he books it in and gives me a jingle. We set up a date and time for photos and get that done first.
A few folks have asked me about the photos I post and the biggest question I get is how do I fill in the markings. I heat the revolver slightly with a heat gun until it is hot enough to melt a white china marking pencil. The pencil material (it’s a colored wax-like substance) liquifies as soon as hits the hot metal and fills the stampings. Let it cool a little and wipe off excess with a clean cloth and you’re good to go! When I started doing photos like this many years ago, I tried using baby powder, chalk, flour, etc. Don’t do it. They are all abrasive and will damage the finish, particularly on parkerized guns.
You can get the china marking pencils off Amazon. Search for, duh, ‘china marking pencils’. Sometimes called grease pencils. Heat gun courtesy of Lowes.
Also, I spent one hundred dollars and got a portable little photo light box set-up. Absolutely hands-down worth it. My gun photo quality jumped by an immeasurable magnitude when I got this thing. Can you dummy something up with a cardboard box, some white oak tag and some painters flood lights? Probably. Don’t bother. Hit Amazon, drop the C-note and get one of these things. I can not recommend one of these too much.
In addition to the lightbox (which I can not recommend enough!), a porn-quality digital camera helps. You can do good work with the lightbox and a cheapo digital camera or even a cell phone, but for me, a Pornhub-worthy digital camera is the way to go!
Photos are usually pretty straight forward: left side of gun, right side of gun, butt serial number, cylinder serial number, barrel serial number, grips front and back, topstrap, backstrap, special features if any. On this gun I forgot to fill in the MADE IN U.S.A. stamping.
Once the images are shot, they are edited. I usually make them all 750 pixels wide so they fit on the various forums and I edit the images a little for light and clarity.
I’ll throw a copyright mark, year, my name and website on the image as well. I do this mainly because sometime the images work their way onto other sites for other purposes and I’m generally ok with that as long as people know where the original came from.
So what images did I get?
Good looking gun! Really looks much better in person. Definitely one of the better cop guns I’ve come across, especially considering the gun is almost 80 years old!
I think I’m on safe ground when I call this a post-war transitional.
It still sports the pre-war MADE IN U.S.A. stamping and, of course, is a 5-screw.
I didn’t notice it until I got the gun under the -really- bright lights; the frame looks to have been drilled for a lanyard loop at one time and appears to have been -expertly- filled in by the factory. Those boys knew what they were about; that’s darn fine work! And the filled lanyard loop just checks off another box on the ‘post-war transitional checklist’.
Grip serial number, as stated in the ad copy, is not a match. If you’ve got a gun numbered 591011, I have your grips!
Typical 2-line barrel address.
Shield number 13347 appears on the backstrap confirming that this gun went to Probationary Patrolman James E. MCNULTY.
So now that I have confirmed that this particular piece of Wayward NYPD Problem-Solving Equipment is legit and the former property of Probationary Patrolman James E. MCNULTY, let us try and see what kind of adventures MCNULTY dragged his trusty M&P on.
Record searching for NYPD stuff is a bit of a challenge. Despite having a budget larger that the GDP of 37 different nations, the NYPD is not an organization known for information outreach. Most of the research I rely on is from databases made by myself from various sources or from info provided by retired dinosaurs who were –really—into Job history.
First place to look is in back copies of The City Record (TCR). TCR was a small newspaper published daily by the City that detailed every transaction the City made. The idea was to provide fiscal transparency as a way of preventing future Tammany Halls; if every dollar has to be publicly accounted for, then the ability make secret sweetheart deals is taken away, or so the thinking went.
The result was that amongst all the other data TCR published, it also published weekly reports from all city agencies, including the Police Department. Each weekly police report listed who was appointed, had appointment revoked, died, retired, fired, disciplined, suspended, reinstated, transferred, had a name change, went on temporary assignment, received a reward, was promoted or demoted. Information also included salary, command and home address.
What I’ve done is taken all of this information and put it into multi-page spreadsheets based by year. Then what I can do is type in a single name for that year and get back every mention of that name in that years records. I did that for the 1946 records and this came up:
In the Police Department reports for 1946 there were four men named MCNULTY who received appointments. One of them was listed as James E. MCNULTY who was appointed a Patrolman on Probation, Command unspecified (but almost certainly Police Academy) on 01JUN46 at a salary of $2,000 per year, rising to $2,420 once of Probation. The source of this data is listed as The City Record, 22JUN46, page 2933.
Copies of TCR prior to 1947 were digitized and I have a copy of that particular edition:
I have made these little yearly Police Report datasets for 1940-1946 and have been slowly combining them into a single massive database that should allow me to track a mans career over several years with just a single search. I would type a fellows name and get back his appointment in 1925, a transfer in 1928, a couple promotions in the 1930’s, a reward granted in 1939, and a retirement in 1945. Undoubtedly there would be many more interesting entries along the way. It’s an ongoing project. Anyway….
I did find him mentioned earlier than 1946 with the Police Department though. Found an entry in TCR for 10SEP42 that had a copy of the Eligibles List. The Eligibles List was the list of those men who took the civil service exam for Patrolman and passed; it listed their name, address, place on the list and score.
Here we see that James E. MCNULTY was living at 102 E. 8th Street in Brooklyn when he took the test and scored an 83, placing him 825th on the list in 1942. So here’s what we’ve learned so far: James E. MCNULTY of 102 E.8th St. in Brooklyn (9/42) was 825th on the Patrolman Eligible List with a score of 83. He was then appointed a Patrolman on Probation on 01JUN46 at a salary of $2000, which would go up to $2,420 when he was off probation. He purchased a S&W M&P revolver #S812894 from the Department on 03JUN46 and had his shield number, 13347, stamped on it.
So far, that’s some pretty good background on the gun and the guy who carried it. I love how back in the day, you’d get appointed and a day or two later they gave you your gun and shield and -then- started you at the Police Academy. Things have really changed!
MCNULTY took the exam and passed it in 1942 and didn’t get appointed until1946. Why? Well, the exam he took was very likely the last one the city gave before they put a general moratorium on hiring. You see, the City at that time had to pay cops who were drafted the difference between their cop salary and their military pay while they were away. It didn’t make financial sense to put in a class of 2,000 guys only to have them all get drafted a few months down the road and then have to pay the difference in those 2,000 salaries.
This is why many large and not-so-large municipal police departments, including the NYPD, hired Temporary Patrolman; Military Replacements as a way of making up for the inevitable wartime manpower shortages.
So what did MCNULTY do between testing and appointment? Well, there was that whole pesky World War Two thing.
For this, I went to a publicly accessible subscription database offered through Ancestry called Fold3.com. It’s a searchable database of various military records. For what I do, at the level I do it, it pays for me to have a subscription to both Ancestry and Fold3 as well as a few others (more about them later). I actually spend about $500 per year on these subscriptions, so for those of you who get the free historical letters from me, keep that in mind when I mention the Amazon Tip Jar!
Surprisingly, there is not too much about MCNULTY in Fold3 although there is enough data to show that he served in the U.S. Army Air Force. One piece of handy information that came out of fold3 was some data on his death:
Key takeaways: Born 17SEP19, died 02MAR05 in Spring Lake, NJ. The address of Spring Lake, NJ took me to the next great database: newspapers.com.
If you don’t have a subscription to newspapers.com, I highly recommend it. Relatively cheap (less than a C-note per year) it is absolutely ridiculously useful. For gun research, especially law enforcement guns, it is a gold mine! I know a lot of gun guys will agree with me on that because I occasionally see a familiar name tagged to an article on famous guns or famous gun people (you guys know whom you are!).
I executed a search for MCNULTY in NJ newspapers for the year 2005 and got a hit on an obituary:
Some good info here. According to this, he did 20 years and then pulled the pin. We already know he came on in 1946 so he must have retired around 1966 or so. Also, we learn that he retired as an LT.
A search of NYC newspapers from 1940 to 1970 turned up a bunch of MCNULTY articles but only one (so far) one this particular MCNULTY:
According to the 02APR54 Brooklyn Eagle, MCNULTY got raised up to SGT. It’s fun to read the article and note that they would publish the officers home address and school where his children went. Different days! I love the look on the face of the former SGT Smith in the first picture. Four kids, including 3.5 y/o twins; the look on his face says that he’d rather be on a footpost in a snowstorm than home with that squalling brood!
As I said, not much came up on MCNULTY in my newspapers.com search and that was a little surprising. He may have been assigned to a ‘quiet house’ or he may have been one of those guys who just flew under the radar. There were enough MCNULTY police articles to make me curious, so I dropped over to ancestry.com to see what was there on the fellow. Ancestry.com is useful for me but unless you’re heavy into genealogy as a hobby its probably not worth signing up for if all your doing is researching one or two guns. It can, however, be lots of fun to play in and sometimes you may find stuff you don’t want to know. (My pizza guy found a half-brother he never knew about like this!).
Ancestry turned up a few MCNULTY entries but since I now had the birth date and death date, it was easier to narrow down the field.
Interesting….the four MCNULTY children all live with mom. Let’s look a little closer……
This why I was getting so many unwanted PATROLMAN MCNULTY hits when I was searching newspapers.com! Turns out James MCNULTY had an older brother who was also a Patrolman! Same first initial too! No wonder my searching was so challenging.
This is what I’ve assembled so far.
I have a hook for back issues of the Departments internal magazine, Spring 3100, and I’ll check that to see what I can find. Also, a retired dinosaur who asks for anonymity has digital copies of some General Orders going back a ways and offered to check them for Patrolman MCNULTY. I also have to contact the marvelous historians at the Smith & Wesson Historical Foundation and get the gun lettered.
So, there you have it. That’s what I’ve found so far and how I do it.
Thank you for reading this far.
Best,
RM Vivas
Cruising gun auction sites at 0300 is getting to be expensive and addictive. How else can I explain why I have –5—S&W M36-1’s that letter as NYPD guns?
It’s getting to the point now where when I am cruising the gun sites I don’t bid on an NYPD gun unless:
• The price is right
• It is an upgrade (condition, box & docs, engraved, etc.)
• It comes back to a famous person or event
I recently picked up a new addition to the RM Vivas Home for Wayward NYPD Problem-Solving Equipment.
As most you have seen (and can easily search), whenever I pick up a new gun I do a little write up with photos of it. Most of the time this write-up is fairly straight forward but I’ve been thinking lately that those write-ups are getting a bit boring/redundant.
I decided that for this gun I would do a start-to-finish sort of thing that shows how I find these guns and, I think most importantly, how I document them.
The search process usually starts with me being fairly bored at work and hitting the gun auction sites. No real surprise there, as I think most of us do that.
I’ll search for NYPD stuff usually by searching for gun name. You can search NYPD but you’ll get back all kinds of junk although a couple of NYPD guns will pop up. Usually though, because the seller knows (or thinks they know) they are NYPD guns, they’ll try to ask a premium. How else do you explain a plain Jane M64 NY-1 4-inch SB going for five grand or a 2-inch RB M64-NY-1 going for $2,500?
With the more esoteric stuff it’s fairly easy. I’ll do a search for Terrier and since there are not that many, maybe a dozen will turn up. I’ll pull up the ads, note the serial numbers and then run the numbers through my NYPD records.
This is where I have an advantage that no one else really has; I have copies of the surviving NYPD purchase and sales records. Does it give me an unfair advantage? Yes. Did I earn it? Absolutely. Do you know how many boxes of Dunkin’ Donuts I had to schlepp down to the Equipment Bureau with to schmooze my way past the very loosely and poorly defined limits of my letter of introduction? I spent literally thousands of hours acquiring and transcribing the records. As you’ll see a little further down, I then used those records as a springboard to find and confirm other records and construct my own databases to make it easier to gather info.
Annoyingly, most folks don’t list the guns serial number in their ad copy. I usually look at all the photos first and if I don’t see the serial number in the photos, I’ll check the ad copy. If it isn’t in the ad copy I’ll send a message to the seller that says “Greetings, Can you provide a s/n for this gun? I am looking for ones from a specific contract. Best, RM Vivas” Most people are good enough to respond. I’ll then run the s/n through my records and see if it’s a hit or not.
One exception to this, and it applies with this marvelous little gun, is when the image shows a shield number stamped on the gun. One day I’m going to do a detailed photo-heavy post just on shield stampings. In this case, the auction photos showed the shield stamping and that was good enough for me.
So, I’m looking at search results for “Wesson M&P” and this pops up:
(obviously, it wasn’t tagged SOLD at the time; the images are from after the auction closed)
OK, a nice little 4-inch S-Series M&P. Normally I’ll see a few of these and give them a pass but this one jumped out at me because, at the time I came across it, the bid was rather low and I thought the gun in rather good condition.
My interest having been piqued; I decide to review some of the seller’s other images:
This image is what got me going; note numbers that appear to be stamped on the backstrap. My experience tells me that that is a shield stamping. Now I’m definitely interested. I keep going and find the seller has conveniently provided a nice image of the serial number:
S812894
Not only is this a likely NYPD gun, it is a delightfully close serial number to the traditionally ‘last V-Series’ gun, V811,119.
The ad copy is short and not really very detailed:
“…Showing finish wear mostly on some of the edges/high spots. Numbers matching except for the grips. 4 inch barrel with a sharp, shiny bore in very good condition. Smooth action, operates as it should. Please refer to the photos, and judge for yourself. Stock number 24/09/0309…”
As is usually the case with these types of guns, the seller did not think the shield numbers were worth mentioning in the ad copy. I see that a lot and I think it is because the sellers feel that putting them in the ad copy is basically them saying “Hey, someone defaced this gun with a bunch of numbers; don’t use that as a bargaining point for a lower price”.
Now I have to look up the serial numbers.
First I go to the spreadsheet the lists every serial number in the paper records. It took me -years- to get them all typed in. I open the spreadsheet for S-series guns, All Done – M&P V_S, and find this entry:
According to my notes, the record of this gun appears in Book 42-46 page 139 and shows a sales date of 03JUN46.
There was a time when the next step would be to go to the paper records and sort through those:
Since discovering that the massive and overpriced copier next to my office at work can scan a few hundred pages at hi-res onto a thumb drive in less time than it takes to steal a case of copy paper, I scanned all the paper records into .pdf files to make my life much easier!
I open the scanned copy of the paper records, Book 42-46, and flip to page 139 and find this:
Serial number matches, shield number looks like it matches too.
Having identified the gun as NYPD the next question is do I bid it? In this instance the gun checked off two boxes of the three I listed earlier: it’s in much better shape than the other S-series gun I have now and the price is right. Actually, I think the price is pretty damn good! I think anytime you can score a nice mid-century M&P for less than four bills you should grab it.
I waited for the auction to end, confirmed my being high bidder, got a final bill and shipped out payment and FFL.
A word about the final bill; even though the screwing is nowhere near as severe as one would get at a major auction house (looking at you Julias and RIA) the fees and taxes do add up. This gun closed at $382, a good price! Then there is a %3 surcharge for credit card (+$11.46), shipping (+$30.00), government extortion charge/taxes (+$33.88) and fees (?) (+$3.82). This brings the grand total for my $382 revolver to $461.16. My FFL does my transfers on the arm, otherwise this would be pushing half a G!!
Still, it’s a nice gun, not an outrageous price, it is in better condition than the S-series gun I have now and it’ll letter both through my records and the factory so…..
The gun arrives at my FFL and he books it in and gives me a jingle. We set up a date and time for photos and get that done first.
A few folks have asked me about the photos I post and the biggest question I get is how do I fill in the markings. I heat the revolver slightly with a heat gun until it is hot enough to melt a white china marking pencil. The pencil material (it’s a colored wax-like substance) liquifies as soon as hits the hot metal and fills the stampings. Let it cool a little and wipe off excess with a clean cloth and you’re good to go! When I started doing photos like this many years ago, I tried using baby powder, chalk, flour, etc. Don’t do it. They are all abrasive and will damage the finish, particularly on parkerized guns.
You can get the china marking pencils off Amazon. Search for, duh, ‘china marking pencils’. Sometimes called grease pencils. Heat gun courtesy of Lowes.
Also, I spent one hundred dollars and got a portable little photo light box set-up. Absolutely hands-down worth it. My gun photo quality jumped by an immeasurable magnitude when I got this thing. Can you dummy something up with a cardboard box, some white oak tag and some painters flood lights? Probably. Don’t bother. Hit Amazon, drop the C-note and get one of these things. I can not recommend one of these too much.
In addition to the lightbox (which I can not recommend enough!), a porn-quality digital camera helps. You can do good work with the lightbox and a cheapo digital camera or even a cell phone, but for me, a Pornhub-worthy digital camera is the way to go!
Photos are usually pretty straight forward: left side of gun, right side of gun, butt serial number, cylinder serial number, barrel serial number, grips front and back, topstrap, backstrap, special features if any. On this gun I forgot to fill in the MADE IN U.S.A. stamping.
Once the images are shot, they are edited. I usually make them all 750 pixels wide so they fit on the various forums and I edit the images a little for light and clarity.
I’ll throw a copyright mark, year, my name and website on the image as well. I do this mainly because sometime the images work their way onto other sites for other purposes and I’m generally ok with that as long as people know where the original came from.
So what images did I get?
Good looking gun! Really looks much better in person. Definitely one of the better cop guns I’ve come across, especially considering the gun is almost 80 years old!
I think I’m on safe ground when I call this a post-war transitional.
It still sports the pre-war MADE IN U.S.A. stamping and, of course, is a 5-screw.
I didn’t notice it until I got the gun under the -really- bright lights; the frame looks to have been drilled for a lanyard loop at one time and appears to have been -expertly- filled in by the factory. Those boys knew what they were about; that’s darn fine work! And the filled lanyard loop just checks off another box on the ‘post-war transitional checklist’.
Grip serial number, as stated in the ad copy, is not a match. If you’ve got a gun numbered 591011, I have your grips!
Typical 2-line barrel address.
Shield number 13347 appears on the backstrap confirming that this gun went to Probationary Patrolman James E. MCNULTY.
So now that I have confirmed that this particular piece of Wayward NYPD Problem-Solving Equipment is legit and the former property of Probationary Patrolman James E. MCNULTY, let us try and see what kind of adventures MCNULTY dragged his trusty M&P on.
Record searching for NYPD stuff is a bit of a challenge. Despite having a budget larger that the GDP of 37 different nations, the NYPD is not an organization known for information outreach. Most of the research I rely on is from databases made by myself from various sources or from info provided by retired dinosaurs who were –really—into Job history.
First place to look is in back copies of The City Record (TCR). TCR was a small newspaper published daily by the City that detailed every transaction the City made. The idea was to provide fiscal transparency as a way of preventing future Tammany Halls; if every dollar has to be publicly accounted for, then the ability make secret sweetheart deals is taken away, or so the thinking went.
The result was that amongst all the other data TCR published, it also published weekly reports from all city agencies, including the Police Department. Each weekly police report listed who was appointed, had appointment revoked, died, retired, fired, disciplined, suspended, reinstated, transferred, had a name change, went on temporary assignment, received a reward, was promoted or demoted. Information also included salary, command and home address.
What I’ve done is taken all of this information and put it into multi-page spreadsheets based by year. Then what I can do is type in a single name for that year and get back every mention of that name in that years records. I did that for the 1946 records and this came up:
In the Police Department reports for 1946 there were four men named MCNULTY who received appointments. One of them was listed as James E. MCNULTY who was appointed a Patrolman on Probation, Command unspecified (but almost certainly Police Academy) on 01JUN46 at a salary of $2,000 per year, rising to $2,420 once of Probation. The source of this data is listed as The City Record, 22JUN46, page 2933.
Copies of TCR prior to 1947 were digitized and I have a copy of that particular edition:
I have made these little yearly Police Report datasets for 1940-1946 and have been slowly combining them into a single massive database that should allow me to track a mans career over several years with just a single search. I would type a fellows name and get back his appointment in 1925, a transfer in 1928, a couple promotions in the 1930’s, a reward granted in 1939, and a retirement in 1945. Undoubtedly there would be many more interesting entries along the way. It’s an ongoing project. Anyway….
I did find him mentioned earlier than 1946 with the Police Department though. Found an entry in TCR for 10SEP42 that had a copy of the Eligibles List. The Eligibles List was the list of those men who took the civil service exam for Patrolman and passed; it listed their name, address, place on the list and score.
Here we see that James E. MCNULTY was living at 102 E. 8th Street in Brooklyn when he took the test and scored an 83, placing him 825th on the list in 1942. So here’s what we’ve learned so far: James E. MCNULTY of 102 E.8th St. in Brooklyn (9/42) was 825th on the Patrolman Eligible List with a score of 83. He was then appointed a Patrolman on Probation on 01JUN46 at a salary of $2000, which would go up to $2,420 when he was off probation. He purchased a S&W M&P revolver #S812894 from the Department on 03JUN46 and had his shield number, 13347, stamped on it.
So far, that’s some pretty good background on the gun and the guy who carried it. I love how back in the day, you’d get appointed and a day or two later they gave you your gun and shield and -then- started you at the Police Academy. Things have really changed!
MCNULTY took the exam and passed it in 1942 and didn’t get appointed until1946. Why? Well, the exam he took was very likely the last one the city gave before they put a general moratorium on hiring. You see, the City at that time had to pay cops who were drafted the difference between their cop salary and their military pay while they were away. It didn’t make financial sense to put in a class of 2,000 guys only to have them all get drafted a few months down the road and then have to pay the difference in those 2,000 salaries.
This is why many large and not-so-large municipal police departments, including the NYPD, hired Temporary Patrolman; Military Replacements as a way of making up for the inevitable wartime manpower shortages.
So what did MCNULTY do between testing and appointment? Well, there was that whole pesky World War Two thing.
For this, I went to a publicly accessible subscription database offered through Ancestry called Fold3.com. It’s a searchable database of various military records. For what I do, at the level I do it, it pays for me to have a subscription to both Ancestry and Fold3 as well as a few others (more about them later). I actually spend about $500 per year on these subscriptions, so for those of you who get the free historical letters from me, keep that in mind when I mention the Amazon Tip Jar!
Surprisingly, there is not too much about MCNULTY in Fold3 although there is enough data to show that he served in the U.S. Army Air Force. One piece of handy information that came out of fold3 was some data on his death:
Key takeaways: Born 17SEP19, died 02MAR05 in Spring Lake, NJ. The address of Spring Lake, NJ took me to the next great database: newspapers.com.
If you don’t have a subscription to newspapers.com, I highly recommend it. Relatively cheap (less than a C-note per year) it is absolutely ridiculously useful. For gun research, especially law enforcement guns, it is a gold mine! I know a lot of gun guys will agree with me on that because I occasionally see a familiar name tagged to an article on famous guns or famous gun people (you guys know whom you are!).
I executed a search for MCNULTY in NJ newspapers for the year 2005 and got a hit on an obituary:
Some good info here. According to this, he did 20 years and then pulled the pin. We already know he came on in 1946 so he must have retired around 1966 or so. Also, we learn that he retired as an LT.
A search of NYC newspapers from 1940 to 1970 turned up a bunch of MCNULTY articles but only one (so far) one this particular MCNULTY:
According to the 02APR54 Brooklyn Eagle, MCNULTY got raised up to SGT. It’s fun to read the article and note that they would publish the officers home address and school where his children went. Different days! I love the look on the face of the former SGT Smith in the first picture. Four kids, including 3.5 y/o twins; the look on his face says that he’d rather be on a footpost in a snowstorm than home with that squalling brood!
As I said, not much came up on MCNULTY in my newspapers.com search and that was a little surprising. He may have been assigned to a ‘quiet house’ or he may have been one of those guys who just flew under the radar. There were enough MCNULTY police articles to make me curious, so I dropped over to ancestry.com to see what was there on the fellow. Ancestry.com is useful for me but unless you’re heavy into genealogy as a hobby its probably not worth signing up for if all your doing is researching one or two guns. It can, however, be lots of fun to play in and sometimes you may find stuff you don’t want to know. (My pizza guy found a half-brother he never knew about like this!).
Ancestry turned up a few MCNULTY entries but since I now had the birth date and death date, it was easier to narrow down the field.
Interesting….the four MCNULTY children all live with mom. Let’s look a little closer……
This why I was getting so many unwanted PATROLMAN MCNULTY hits when I was searching newspapers.com! Turns out James MCNULTY had an older brother who was also a Patrolman! Same first initial too! No wonder my searching was so challenging.
This is what I’ve assembled so far.
I have a hook for back issues of the Departments internal magazine, Spring 3100, and I’ll check that to see what I can find. Also, a retired dinosaur who asks for anonymity has digital copies of some General Orders going back a ways and offered to check them for Patrolman MCNULTY. I also have to contact the marvelous historians at the Smith & Wesson Historical Foundation and get the gun lettered.
So, there you have it. That’s what I’ve found so far and how I do it.
Thank you for reading this far.
Best,
RM Vivas
