It was my birthday, and I was disappointed. I had no right to be because I got what I wanted, a gun that launched a 17-caliber steel ball at about 250 feet-per-second, with the signature of a fictional, red-haired cowboy carved in the side of the stock. I think I was eight years old and I arose about 5 am and went down to the kitchen where mom and dad were starting the fire in the cookstove, dad soon to go out to do the morning chores. They hadn’t wrapped my present yet and barely had time to throw a couple newspapers over it on the kitchen table. After chores and breakfast I was allowed to get my hands on the brightly colored box and its contents.
It didn’t take long to get the Daisy outside, put a coffee can upside down over a fencepost, back off about 15 feet, cock the arm, and let one fly. It hit with a metallic “clink.” I went up to investigate, and that is when the disappointment started. It hit close to where I had aimed, but I could not believe the puny dent the BB made (coffee cans were very sturdy in those days). Surely Red Ryder would never have survived the rigors of the Old West armed with one of these! I don’t know what I had expected; maybe the BB would go through the can and the fencepost and sting a pig in the butt in a field on the other side?
I concealed my disappointment and I don’t think it took very long to recover from it. Over the years I had a lot of fun with ol’ Red. Sparrows and starlings were threatened and occasionally I got close enough to hit one. The best thing, however, was shooting glass. We put our kitchen trash in an old stock tank behind the chicken house where my favorite game was to see how many shots it would take to bring down the top of a ketchup bottle by shooting at its shoulder. Pickle jars could be very tough, but light bulbs were a special treat. In fact, there are few things more fun than shooting glass with a BB gun. Safely, of course, but if you have any common sense, it is quite possible. This caused no trouble years ago because the stock tank was simply loaded into the truck when it became full, and it didn’t matter whether the ketchup bottles were intact or reduced to slivers.
Luckily, I survived my childhood with no BBs in my eyes or glass cuts on my hands. I did, however, suffer a few raps across my fingers from neglecting to close the lever before pulling the trigger. The Daisy Red Ryder Carbine has been with me throughout my shooting life and it will still launch a BB when I ask. It was the first in a long line of rifles and handguns, a lot of them acquired in a search for more noise and power that began on that birthday long ago.
I wonder how many lifelong quests have been stimulated by childhood disappointment.