The Gun Book for Boys by Silvio Calabi & Steve Helsley & Roger Sanger

Author:Silvio Calabi & Steve Helsley & Roger Sanger [Silvio Calabi, Steve Helsley, and Roger Sanger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781608931996
Publisher: Down East Books

Each episode began with actor James Arness, “Marshal Matt Dillon,” squaring off against a faceless outlaw on the main street of what was supposed to be Dodge City, Kansas, sometime after the Civil War. The show became a monster hit. Each week kids all over the country would test their reflexes in that opening sequence. (We always wondered how many TV screens wound up shattered by bullets.)

Marshal Dillon’s adversary was played by a stuntman named Arvo Ojala, a genuine fast-draw expert who taught two generations of movie and TV actors how to handle guns. (He also invented the steel-lined safety holster, although too late to save Clyde Howell’s leg.) Marshal Dillon was the hero, so naturally he won every time. Western novels, movies and radio and TV shows had a code of unwritten rules; one of them was that the villains were always “back-shootin’, no-good polecats” in black hats, and they always lost in the final dramatic showdown.

Such do-or-die confrontations with six-guns were historical nonsense, the product of Hollywood screenwriters’ imaginations, but they touched something in the American soul. By the late 1950s, 200,000 people were reportedly taking part in fast-draw competitions, including stars like Clint Eastwood, Jerry Lewis and Sammy Davis Jr. (Ask your parents.) Championship matches were held in Las Vegas. A man named Dee Woolem, one of the “cowboys” who staged shoot-outs for the crowd at Knott’s Berry Farm, in California, became the “top gun.” He was clocked at 0.37 seconds to draw and fire his single-action revolver on a signal, and 0.12 seconds when he could draw on his own. It takes that long to blink your eye.

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