Lately I've been doing a lot of cleaning out and getting rid of stuff. It involves moving things around, consolidating, sorting, etc. Tonight I was working in my library, sorting through things. For many years, I've wanted to organize my books by subject matter. I'm finally doing it. It's quite a job when hundreds of books are involved. However, I started out with a culling process and reduced the mass which makes it a bit easier.
Anyway, I had a brown cardboard box with paper documents from all the guns I've sold over the years. That would be since 1965. It was wasting space on a book shelf so it had to be moved. I took the sheaves of paper out of the box and in so doing, some old price tags fell out. They were, quite at random:
I bought the Luger when I was 17 years old. There was a guy in my home town who had a half-assed war relics swap shop. You could say he was an unlicensed gun dealer. If a person had the cash, they could buy any gun he had on offer. $65 was quite a little wad of money for a 17 year old in 1967.
The Winchester Model 88, I think I bought that one in the early 1980's. Strangely enough, it was a surplus police gun. It was used for a while by the SWAT team of a local PD. Note the tag says, "no mag." Anyone who has knowledge of these rifles knows these days that's a major defect, since Model 88 magazines are like gold. They weren't that expensive in the 1980's but they weren't being given away, either. I suspect that quite a few of them got lost over the years.
By weird coincidence, many years later I bought another Win. Model 88 and it also came from police auction. This one had been seized as evidence in a crime. Have you ever watched Perry Mason on TV, the part in the courtroom where Lieutenant Tragg is on the witness stand, a firearm is in evidence, and he is asked if this is the gun in question? He stipulates that it is, and says, "That's my mark on it." Well, this second Mod. 88 had a detective's mark on the stock, along with dried blood and flecks of tissue, circled in black Magic Marker. Something was buggered up inside that I had to repair but it turned out to be a decent rifle.
Anyway, I had a brown cardboard box with paper documents from all the guns I've sold over the years. That would be since 1965. It was wasting space on a book shelf so it had to be moved. I took the sheaves of paper out of the box and in so doing, some old price tags fell out. They were, quite at random:
I bought the Luger when I was 17 years old. There was a guy in my home town who had a half-assed war relics swap shop. You could say he was an unlicensed gun dealer. If a person had the cash, they could buy any gun he had on offer. $65 was quite a little wad of money for a 17 year old in 1967.
The Winchester Model 88, I think I bought that one in the early 1980's. Strangely enough, it was a surplus police gun. It was used for a while by the SWAT team of a local PD. Note the tag says, "no mag." Anyone who has knowledge of these rifles knows these days that's a major defect, since Model 88 magazines are like gold. They weren't that expensive in the 1980's but they weren't being given away, either. I suspect that quite a few of them got lost over the years.
By weird coincidence, many years later I bought another Win. Model 88 and it also came from police auction. This one had been seized as evidence in a crime. Have you ever watched Perry Mason on TV, the part in the courtroom where Lieutenant Tragg is on the witness stand, a firearm is in evidence, and he is asked if this is the gun in question? He stipulates that it is, and says, "That's my mark on it." Well, this second Mod. 88 had a detective's mark on the stock, along with dried blood and flecks of tissue, circled in black Magic Marker. Something was buggered up inside that I had to repair but it turned out to be a decent rifle.