Please help identify my Grandfather’s off-duty gun

[JP@AK]

Mike

No chance. Does it help matters that I took my B.S. studies in geology at Portland State University (50 years ago)? Not a foreign country to me, but you could not pay me enough to move back there from Alaska.

 

[charlie sherrill]

Ya'll keep the posts on the old stuff coming. I know I love it and many others do also. I posted earlier about Paw Paw's old bug. I did not post the reason he got it. He was a walking beat cop. He got into a shootout in downtown Hattiesburg,Ms. around 1937. He had walked up on a couple of brothers in the process of burglarizing a furniture store. Shots were fired. Paw Paw ran out of ammo. That's why he got a BUG later. No radios back then but Paw Paw blew his whistle and the red beacon on the tallest building in town came on. It was a signal for a beat cop to go to a call box and call the station. Paw Paw was not hit but an innocent bystander a couple of blocks away was hit and killed instantly. This was not known until about 30 minutes later after back up had arrived and the burglars subdued. The Grand Jury was was called out and the burglars were indicted that night. The Circuit Judge told the indicted burglars they could plead guilty to manslaughter or face "Old Sparky" (the local electric chair) at a trial. There were no public defenders back then. The electric chair was located on the top floor of the Forrest County Jail. They pled guilty and were on their way to serve a 20 year sentence at the Mississippi State Prison at Parchman the next morning. Fast forward: The brothers served every minute of their sentence and were paroled around 1957. One of them left the state. The other reproduced. I started as a LEO in 1969. I had many encounters with this man's children who apparently were no better than him. I retired 11 years ago and my fellow officers still on the job are still dealing with his grandchildren.

 

[Truckman]

I retired 11 years ago and my fellow officers still on the job are still dealing with his grandchildren.

Old Sparky was (and still has the potential for being) a great deterrent to crime...Studies of those who were instantly rehabilitated by such devices show that the recidivism rate is under 1%......Ben

 

[mikepriwer]

Jack

That will do! I finished my B.S. in Mechanical Engineering at Washington University in St Louis (my hometown) in January of 1961, and went immediately to Northwestern for graduate work in Mechanical Engineering and Material Science. Finished my degree in the summer of 1963.

Honeyman Hardware ultimately occupied a whole square block, across the street from the main Post Office. It went out of business at least 30 years ago, and is now Honeyman Lofts. Parts of it are scheduled for demolition and reconstruction. They were a major arms distributor and retailer for many decades.

Regards, Mike

 

[rct269]

Yet another family heirloom is my father-in-law's 4" M&P. He bought it new in 1920, and carried it daily in the hip pocket of his "uniform" for 60+ years. As a dairy farmer, his "uniform" was bib overalls. He never said why he carried it, but he sure could shoot it.

I was visiting long before he became my father-in-law, and took advantage of the fact you could buy a gun in Georgia once you'd passed your 18th birthday. Georgia's just a hop, skip and a jump down the road from the farm, and I returned with a shiny new K-22----ready, willing and able to clean his clock in a shooting contest.

He held his gun all wrong, stood all wrong, and did everything else all wrong; but it turned out I was the one who got his clock cleaned. He just smiled.

It was several years later that I heard about being aware of an old man with a gun----because he probably knows how to use it. I'd already learned that lesson!

Ralph Tremaine