First Rifle Nostalgia

My first rifle was a Remington Model 512 given to me by an uncle on my 12th birthday. It was a used rifle, in good condition, and I put thousands of rounds through it in my youth. I recently passed it on to my grandson on his 12th birthday.

Ted
 
My first rifle was a Marlin 60 .22 with a Tasco (?) scope. 1000's of rounds went through that rifle, nothing was safe.
 
My first was a .410 single shot, dad gave it to me when I was 4. When I was 8 he gave me a Winchester pump .22 which he bought from an old friend for $5. I promptly put 2 rounds through my bedroom ceiling and lost custody for a year. I shot a lot of jack rabbits and ground squirrels with that thing. When I graduated 8th grade, he gave me a Browning Belgium .22 semi-automatic with a scope and my name engraved on it. That was in 1965, he paid $110 for it. It burned up in the bunkhouse my step-brothers and I were occupying. We blamed the fire on electrical wiring, never told the folks we'd been playing with fireworks. Dad bought me a replacement. Sold the .410 to the Mexican foreman on the farm about that time for $20. I still have the Winchester and the Browning.
 
Tmate said:
Back in 1952 I bought my first rifle. It was a J.C. Higgins .22 bolt action with an 8 shot clip. I paid $21.75 on sale at Sears as I recall. That was the most I could afford as a 13 year old with a paper route. I was immensely jealous of a friend whose uncle gave him a remington pump .22 that originally cost close to 3 times that amount.

It's funny how the years soften those recollections. Today, that little .22 from so many decades ago has a special place in my memory. While that particular gun is long gone, I have seen fit to replace it with not one, but two.
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Mine is a JC Higgins also. I still have it.


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My first rifles, my dad's rifles, and my grandfathers' rifles from both parents were all liberated from my possession by meth thieves. One group left while I was in college, and the rest went bye-bye while I was overseas in the Army. No matter what you do to make a storage unit secure, given enough time and complacency by the storage superintendents, those human rats will find a way in and strip it bare. There was nothing I could do, since I was on orders to Kosovo. My dad welded the door to my storage unit shut after dealing with the sheriff reports and left a O/A torch in another unit so I could get in when I returned. I replaced a few of my modern favorites, but the older rifles just weren't worth replacing without the memories and generational history that went with them.
 
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