Best Friends
Some Friends Are Lifelong Pals, And Some Are Even More
Two pals in the High Lonesome, Dave and Bob Johnson.
Hunting season. Lifelong doesn’t adequately describe such friendships.
I had just checked into a hotel room in Chicago in late September 2014 when my cellphone rang. It was bad news, but really not unexpected.
After fighting the good fight for several years against a rare form of cancer, my lifelong pal Bob Johnson finally passed. Sure, he’d tried various experimental treatments, but they finally stopped working, and the end came to a life one might describe as part adventure, some pioneer and a fair bit of hunting. Simply put, he was one of those guys you don’t find in every town.
Bob worked in Alaska — first in communications from Prince William Sound out to a remote island in the Aleutians, somewhere up around Nome — and then up on the North Slope for several years.
At his memorial on Oct. 4, 2014, held in a retirement community where he had taken up residence, I described him as “one of the most dangerous people I ever knew,” which brought a few raised eyebrows before loads of laughter. When I was a kid, and he worked in a Tacoma gas station, Bob created an air rifle using the station’s compressor — from whence comes the air to fill flat tires— by attaching a brass tube to a nozzle and shooting ball bearings or bolts he’d cut, probably at velocities capable of killing a deer or elk. Oh, indeed it worked. He launched projectiles far over the roof of the competing gas station across the street.
But that wasn’t the zenith of his creativeness. One afternoon, he showed me how he’d built a flame thrower using the same air compressor, the same nozzle, a rubber hose, a bit of gas and a flint torch lighter. Yep, this was someone’s science project on steroids, and only years later did it occur to me we were standing above maybe 50,000 gallons of gasoline when he pulled this off.
Hey, if you can’t get blown to Saturn with a pal, what’s the sense in going?
We hunted deer together. He carried a Ruger No. 1 single shot in .243 Winchester and was a deadly shot. We hunted grouse together as well, and he used an old 12-gauge Fox side-by-side double with a single trigger (I presume he altered it). One afternoon, he shot a grouse pretty much right over my head (he had lost sight of me in the brush) and the bird dropped dead just a few feet from where I was standing. I encouraged him to not do that again.
Beretta’s Model 70 in .32 ACP. It has been a keeper
for more than 50 years, and it still has spunk.
The Beretta
When his first wife filed for divorce, Bob needed some cash, so he sold a couple of guns, one being a Model 70 Beretta in .32 ACP. He wanted only a handful of cash, which I scraped together — no small feat for a junior in college.
It was a lightweight pistol, with an alloy frame, familiar Beretta open-top slide, fixed sights and only one magazine. A few years later, when he was down from Alaska visiting his kids and parents, he went with me to the old Chet Paulson gun shop in Tacoma, where I acquired a second magazine. Over the years, I’ve carried that pistol in a shoulder holster, an IWB, in one of my “Undershirt” tuckables and even an ankle rig I built for carry inside a cowboy boot. It has served me well for more than 50 years, so when I dug it out of the safe recently, there was more than simple nostalgia involved. Memories hide in strange places, y’know.
This flat little pocket pistol has been with me in some places where a bigger sidearm would have been too cumbersome. It has always satisfied the first rule of a gunfight: Have a gun. Sure, with 71-grain FMJ ammunition, it’s not a target pistol nor is it a bear stopper, but it can be a fight stopper, and the cartridge is probably responsible for more sudden halts to misbehavior than we might imagine.
I suspect he didn’t want to let it go, but he knew it would be in good hands, and he needed the cash. Once on a grouse hunt high in the mountains north of Mount Rainier National Park, we popped off several rounds at a stump about a hundred yards or so across a canyon. On the first shot, I saw dust puff just to the right of the stump, and after that, every round hit home.
Loaded with 60-grain CorBon DPX ammunition, the little
Beretta shot high at 12 yards, but still put them in the black.
Range Visit
On a recent weekend, I was rummaging around and came across several boxes of .32 ACP ammunition from CorBon, Speer and Remington. The stuff was new in box, and it occurred to me I hadn’t fired this little gem in some time, so it was off to the range to get reacquainted.
One thing about advances in cartridge development, progress hasn’t overlooked the .32 ACP. According to my chronograph, this little popper has grown a pair, delivering muzzle velocities using 60-grain projectiles across the 1,000 fps threshold. Oh, yeah, that got my attention. Whatever else one might accomplish with a round once considered anemic, in an emergency somebody’s whole day will be ruined, and the law abiding citizen with the .32-caliber pistol has had at least a fighting chance.
Remington 71-grain JHPs crossed the screens at an average of 908.2 fps, while Speer 71-grainers clocked slightly higher at 957.3 fps, with the chronograph set 30 inches ahead of the muzzle. Blazer ammunition topped with 60-grain Speer Gold Dots averaged 891.9 fps, while the CorBon DPX ammunition pushing 60-grain Barnes X bullets warped out of the muzzle at 1,189 fps average with a top recorded speed of 1,206 fps.
Dave’s chronograph tells the tale. Modern ammunition in the .32 ACP packs a punch.
To my further delight, the pistol shot rather well at 12 yards. The 60-grain rounds all shot higher than the 71-grainers, but all stayed within the black — though I will not brag about group sizes. The important thing is that all rounds went pretty much where they needed to go in terms of defensive shooting.
Recoil is, as one might expect, pretty mild. Being used to bigger sidearms with larger bore sizes and magnum class ammunition, the .32 ACP even in a lightweight pistol like the Beretta is literally a lark.
Even in today’s world, there is room for the .32 ACP. I’ve seen models from Taurus, KelTec, Beretta and Walther, and used guns in this caliber are frequently found at gun shows or gun shops. Oh, how I wish I could find a Model 1903 Colt in decent condition.
It may be sized for the pocket or purse, but this
little .32 ACP has some powerful memories attached.
Good Friend
There is something reassuring about having a decent pistol, one with which you are familiar and competent, in an emergency. I’d have to say the little Beretta has been a “good friend” at such moments, which have thankfully been few and far between.
In this case, the fact it came from a dear and trusted friend means all the more. This little pistol has a history, and a good one at that. See, it’s not always about the newest gun magazine cover model or the loudest boom in the room. Some guns, just like some friends, transcend all of that.
The Fox shotgun Bob was using that September day so many years ago is now mine. It’s kind of heavy, and it’s got a crummy recoil pad, but it is a friend as well, from a better friend who knew he would personally never again carry it in the alder thickets or up on the fir and hemlock ridges. But he knew it would have an honored place in a good home.
Last photo Dave took of his pal Bob, shooting the .480 Ruger
Alaskan. It was a “great day,” for his ailing amigo.
One doesn’t find many friends in life like Bob Johnson. Our final excursion into the High Lonesome included lighting a few rounds off with a Ruger Alaskan in .480 Ruger, the closest thing to a hand cannon I’ve ever fired, with the exception of a .375 JDJ my arm still remembers. Recoil actually wasn’t nearly as bad as anticipated, and the revolver was pretty accurate at 50 and 100 yards, even out of a short barrel.
Bob still had most of his strength at the time, and he handled that boomer as well as anyone could expect. At the end of our trek, as we came back onto a paved road, he turned to me from the passenger seat and simply said, “I don’t know about you, but for me this has been a great day.”
Now, 10 years after his passing, I wish there had been more.
One More Month!
Only a month remains until Election Day 2024, and now is the time to check your voter registration and make sure it is at your current address.
This is not the time to be, a) Dismissing your apathy with “My vote doesn’t count, anyway” remarks; b) Telling friends, family and co-workers their votes won’t count, either; c) Casting a “protest vote” for some no-chance-in-Hell third party candidate, or, d) Pretending you will accidentally “miss” voting by being on a hunting trip. Nice try, but no cigar. I’ve heard every excuse known to mankind, and they’re all right out of the manure pile.
Your Second Amendment rights are on the line, not just at the national level, but in state legislatures everywhere. From the top down, there is one political party determined to turn your right into a government-regulated privilege, and while you might try to convince yourself it will “never happen here,” just try telling that to people in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, California, Oregon and Washington.
You’re not being asked to send money to anyone or any organization. You’re just being encouraged to get off the couch, fill out a ballot and make your voice heard. Enough voices saying the same thing makes a pretty big noise.
If you will be on a hunting trip, get an absentee ballot now and return it promptly. Don’t allow someone else to discourage you from voting.
