PeachParts Mercedes-Benz Forum - View Single Post - So I brought home my dad's Winchester model 58

t walgamuth · #6 08-27-2007, 06:03 AM

Mine was my dad's first rifle. He was maybe eight when he got it. He lived with it as a kid on the farm near South Whitley Indiana. Amongst his victims was a turkey buzzard and their work horse Queannie. (He thought that shooting her from a mile away the bullet would just bounce off and she would come in from the field....she came in but the bullett had slid under the skin of her belly and she died a couple of days later. He had to aim several feet above her to hit her at that distance. He told his dad ..."Dad, you better not work Queannie today.....his dads said 'you shot her didn't you?....then never said another word about it, and remarkably didn't discipline dad at all, and when the man came from the glue factory to pick up her body and asked...."Say that is a fine looking horse, why did she die, my grandfather just said "She died.""")

Dad went on to become a fine shot and shot in competition with the Studebaker Factory team, eventually receiving a letter to try out for the Olympic shooting team along in the late forties.

It had its original stock up to the late fifties but my sister broke it on an ironwood tree while we all were squirrell hunting. It now carries the stock that came on my dad's 1917 Enfield, cut down by Dad about twenty years ago. In the process he cut off the bolt and repositioned it but the weld failed and the bolt lever is missing (I bet Dad knows where it is at, if he were still alive to tell). So I am looking for a bolt, I guess....come to think of it I think I will search dad's desk next time I am up there....he never threw away ANYTHING.

I got his Enfield too which has a hand finished Walnut hunting stock that I remember watching him finish on the Dining table when I was about eight.

Sort of a matched set. They both have arm straps on them too. The 58 has a cloth one and the Enfield has a nice thick leather one. I will have to post some pics of them if I get ambitious enough.

The 58 says "22 Short" on the barrell. Sort of a 1926 version of what a farmer bought his kid instead of a REd Ryder BBgun (in rural Indiana), I imagine.

Tom W