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Text originally published in 1951 under the same title.
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Publishers Note
Although in most cases we have retained the Authors original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern readers benefit.
We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.
DEAD AIM
By
LEE ECHOLS
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION by C. A. (Smitty) Brown
AT LONG LAST HERES A FUNNY BOOK ABOUT THE FUNNIEST people on earth, the pistol shooters. Lee Echols pistol shooters seem to have even more harrowing experiences than the ones I know about but that may be because Echols is more observing. The ones I know about are bad enough, God knows.
I first cut Echols sign at Florida in 1938 when he came up from Puerto Rico as a firing member of the U.S. Treasury Pistol Team. He had a harmonica with him that talked for him when his pistol didnt, and it wasnt long before he and his Treasury shooters were breaking worlds records all over the place. He broke the Worlds Center Fire Timed Fire record that year at Savannah, and the next year bowled over the .45 Short National record. His team broke records from 1938 until 1941 which are still standing in the record books for all to see and fire at. I remember too well when Echols rubbed out my possibility of a National Individual Pistol Championship when I posted a 280, only to have it soundly beaten in the last relay by him with a 283.
Physically, Echols is an odder looking bird than any of the characters he depicts in his writings. He stands around with his collar full of chins and a dreamy, bed-roomy look about him, augmented a great deal by his eyelids which have the appearance of feathered Venetian blinds. When he walks he seems to have a pogo stick in each heel, and his arms start swinging like Angel Firpo working on a sand bag. He is round like a flour barrel and his pants hang from his pelvis like monks cloth drapes in a haunted house.
Conversationally he is a complete bust and if that nasal Oklahoma twang of his is the Kings English, then the queen ought to take him aside and talk to him about it.
In DEAD AIM, against a background of hell-raising pistol shooters in all sorts of outlandish situations and dilemmas, Echols has brought a rich and perceptive humor to a great and ever growing sport.
This is a book for gaiety and laughter, and to savor the full humor of this strange man, relax and read it.
PREFACE
IN PREPARING A BOOK ON PISTOL SHOOTING THE CARDINAL requisites are a solid working knowledge of ballistics and an acute understanding of the mechanical functions of target guns. I possess neither of these qualifications. When a serious-eyed technician gets right down to cases with me about trajectory and velocity, I not only have no idea what he is talking about but I get violently sick at my stomach. And as far as knowing anything about taking a gun apart, this is as mystifying a process to me as the manufacture of a cyclatron or the theory of bent space. In illustration I will relate an incident which happened to me when I was 21 years old, and I can say that my knowledge of gunsmithing didnt improve one iota from that day to this.
I had just been appointed a Customs Patrol Inspector in San Diego, California, and had a triple-lock .44 caliber Smith & Wesson for a service gun. To say I was proud of this newly manufactured weapon was such an understatement as to be almost libelous.
An older head in the organization took me to the San Diego Police vice squad offices one day to meet Detective Mike Shea who was not only a competent officer, but one of the greatest practical jokers in the city.
Lets see that pistol, kid, Mike said after the introduction, and I emptied the shells from the chamber and proudly handed it to him. Mike took a screw driver from his desk and deftly removed the handles. He scowled at the working mechanism for a minute and then took off the side plate. I watched him in wide-eyed wonder as he quietly took every two pieces apart which could be pried loose from one another. There was the most amazing assortment of springs, fulcrums and sizz-wheels Id ever seen in one pile and when Mike got them all apart and stacked upon his desk, he got up and without another word briskly walked out of his office. I waited for him to come back for ten or fifteen minutes and finally asked the Lieutenant where he had gone. Home was his laconic reply. Deeply hurt, I bundled up the parts of my pistol and took them to a gunsmith in a paper sack. It cost me $2.00 to get it put back in snapping condition.
I dont know why it is that I cant get interested in the arc made by a bullet in flight or in taking a gun apart, fixing whatever is wrong with it and putting it back together. These things seem as essentially a part of a pistol shooters agenda as wearing earplugs in a .45 match, but I have no more interest in them than I have in Cato the Elder, which is a way of saying that I have no interest in them at all.
My stock in trade is the business of sticking a pistol out and whangety-banging with it at a target, and even this itself is subservient to the conviviality, sociability and friendly hell-raising that always seems to accompany such stuff.
So this book will not deal with ballistics, trajectory, velocity or trigger actions. At the time Im writing this preface I dont know just what it will deal with, but I am certainly sure it wont deal with any of those.
DEAD AIM
CHAPTER ONE AN ODD CREATURE
IT HAS BEEN SAID BY PEOPLE MUCH HANDIER WITH whimsy than I that a target pistol is an instrument of precision with a patridge sight on one end of it and a damn fool on the other. I might add to this description by stating that in front of the patridge sight at distances ranging from twenty-five to fifty yards is often an elusive, evasive little black and white arrangement called a Standard American Target and in back of the simpleton on the other end of it is usually years and years of planning, practice and preparation. Ahead of him, in addition to the front end of his pistol and the immediate target whose bulls-eye keeps moving out of the way of the point of impact of his bullets, is black despair.
