Take me back to yesterday once more

“Lord, I love to hear Hank-Williams sing,

But, it will never be the way it was before,

Take me back to yesterday once more.”

While driving the back roads scouting for turkeys and deer, I heard Moe Bandy sing the above song and it reminded me of my Daisy Red Ryder air rifle that I had as a boy. I think every boy in our coal patch neighborhood had one. We spent hours upon hours shooting, bottles, cans, sparrows and targets. Being frugal we always collected and cleaned the spent bbs since money was scarce.

Since the air rifle wasn’t very powerful, I could watch the path of the bb towards the target. I discovered and understood trajectory whenever I moved farther from the target and had to adjust my sight picture to accommodate the drop in the pellets; a lesson that has served me well over decades of hunting, shoot-

ing and teaching Hunter Safety classes.

One day six or eight of us preteens formed two teams and started a BB gun war; with no shooting anyone above the waist. George shot his younger brother, Tom, in the thigh. Tom dropped his air rifle, ran crying and screaming towards home through the grassy field stepping on a wasp nest and getting stung multiple times. After his mother applied first aid, she contacted a few other parents and a disarmament cease fire was instituted for the remainder of the summer. My parents did not discipline or punish me, but we had a very serious discussion about safety and responsibility.

Currently, our club’s Hunter Safety classes use Daisy youth and adult models to teach sighting and trajectory along with safe gun handling. The Daisy air rifle is an excellent, inexpensive way to introduce a novice to the shooting sports. Some of the students, youth and adults, have not experienced shooting more powerful firearms and the air rifles are both an excellent introduction to the shooting sports and confidence builder. Quite often in the classes, when I observe a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction in a student, it takes me back to yesterday once more.

my friend Steve Zahurak is an outdoor writer from Schenectady. Recently there have been articles in several outdoor magazines about the value of using BB guns in improving shooting skills and it reminded me of a short article that Steve had about his use of Daisy BB guns past and present)