Man oh Man...

OK, I'll start over again. Started to write this little tale last night. got almost to the end, and somehow erased everything but the last line. Erased that and went to bed. You can tell I'm a real computer whiz, like most guys my age.

The news that an outfit is reissuing a limited number of '03 Colts copies brought back some memories about a better time that you younger folks haven't had the pleasure of experiencing.

It was 1940 and I was a 13 year old freshman in high school, taking a Vocational Agriculture class.

One day, as we were coming in to sit at our desks, our teacher stopped me, and said “Westhoff, you like guns, don't you?” I of course answered yes, and he handed me a cigar box and said “Here, see if you can put this thing back together.” Inside the box was a .32 cal. '03 Colt which had been taken totally apart. (It was also missing a couple of taper pins, but I didn't discover that 'til later.)

I took the box home and showed it to my parents, and then took it in to my bedroom and started trying to make sense of all those pieces. Up to that time, my experience with guns was limited to an Eastern Arms 20 ga. (Christmas present) and a .22 LR Mossberg I bought with money I'd earned working on a threshing crew the previous Summer.

It took me a couple of weeks. After wasting a few evenings trying to find some pieces that fit together, I finally got a little smarter, and put the frame on a piece of paper, traced the outline, stuck pins through all the holes to mark them, and then put the frame on a bookcase and started figuring out how the innards fit together and fit inside the tracing of the frame. (That's when I discovered the pins were missing. My Dad, who was a machinist for Standard Oil, soon remedied that.)

When I thought I had the puzzle solved I called Dad in to take a look. With his blessing, I then assembled the pistol. Dad had a little Walther pistol he had taken from a German Officer “who would never need it again” back in WW1, that used .32 ACP ammo. We loaded one round; I held the pistol on the far side of a very substantial corral post and fired it into the big manure pile back of the corrals.

Everything worked properly; the reassembled pistol stayed together, and we put it back in the cigar box and I took it back to school the next day.

I handed it back to my teacher, explaining that it had been proof fired and passed the test with flying colors.

My Teacher opened the box, looked at the pistol, closed the box, and handed it back to me.

'Here,” he said, “You can Keep it."

Can you imagine anything like that happening today?