CHARLES ASKINS, JR. — The younger Charles Askins (1907-1999) was the famous son of an even more famous father. He followed in his father’s footsteps as a gun writer, authoring a number of books and serving as field editor of Guns Magazine for many years. He was a colorful, controversial, and often cantankerous individual who in the course of his lifetime was a solider, lawman, firearms expert, noted big game hunter, and marksmanship instructor. He won the National Pistol Championship as a young man and taught marksmanship while a member of the U.S. Border Patrol. He also saw service in World War II and trained South Vietnamese troops in Vietnam.
His books include Hitting the Bull’s-Eye (1939), The Art of Handgun Shooting (1941), Wing and Trap Shooting (1948), The Pistol Shooter’s Book (1953), The Shotgunner’s Book (1958), Texans, Guns & History (1970), Gunfighters (1981), and Unrepentant Sinner (1985; his autobiography).
JEFF COOPER — Jeff Cooper is a marine turned writer who was an expert pistol shot. After retiring at the rank of lieutenant colonel, Cooper wrote a number of books and contributed to national magazines. His books include Fighting Handguns (1958), Guns of the Old West (1959), and The Complete Book of Modern Handgunning (1961). He coached a number of intraservice pistol teams and personally won numerous first places in combat pistol shooting matches. He contributed the sections on pistol shooting to Jack O’Connor’s Complete Book of Shooting (1965).
JULIAN HATCHER—Julian Hatcher (1888-1963) grew up in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. He graduated with honors from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, but after a brief period in the naval service transferred to the U.S. Army. His career in that branch of the military stretched from 1910 to 1946, and throughout that time and beyond, he was recognized as one of America’s leading authorities on firearms. He was an expert on everything from cannons and mortars to small arms, and he was also an inventor of some genius.
Hatcher first garnered major recognition in 1914, when he developed a highly functional breech mechanism; and in the latter stages of World War I, he oversaw military efforts connected with small arms and machine gun engineering and design. He would later be attached first to the Springfield Armory and then the Frankford Arsenal, before a stint as Army chief of ordnance, Small Arms Division, from 1929 to 1933.
It was during this period that he began to make his true mark as a writer and as an expert marksman with both pistol and rifle. Some of his earliest writing was done for the NRA’s Arms and the Man, and he also later contributed to that magazine’s successor publication, American Rifleman. He served as technical editor of the latter magazine for a number of years.
Over the course of his career, Hatcher wrote an impressive number of books, including Pistols and Revolvers and Their Use (1927), Textbook of Pistols and Revolvers (1935), Handloader’s Manual: A Treatise (1937), Hatcher’s Notebook (1947), The Book of the Garand (1948), Handloading: An NRA Manual (1950), and the posthumously published NRA Firearms and Ammunition (1964). Hatcher died on December 4, 1963, and, fittingly for a man who had done stellar duty for his country in so many ways, was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
A. L. A. HIMMELWRIGHT—Abraham Lincoln Art-man Himmelwright, an architect by profession, was one of the leading authorities on pistols and pistol shooting during the first part of the twentieth century. A marksman of the first order, he captained the Americas Shooting Team at one point and also served as president of the United States Revolver Association. His literary efforts include In the Heart of the Bitter-Root Mountains (1895), a description of a famed Montana elk hunt by the Carlin party; the section on pistols and revolvers in Caspar Whitney (editor), Guns, Ammunition, and Tackle (1904); and Pistol and Revolver Shooting (1915). He also wrote The San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, which looked in depth at building materials and the lessons the disaster had to offer.
JACK O’CONNOR—Jack O’Connor (1902-1978) was born in Nogales, Arizona. After a short stint with the U.S. Army’s 158th Infantry at the end of World War I, O’Connor obtained undergraduate and graduate degrees and then taught college in Texas and Arizona, all the while moonlighting by writing for newspapers and working for the Associated Press. He wrote two novels in the early 1930s, but as his family grew, O’Connor turned to writing for outdoor magazines to supplement his meager income.
It was in writing on guns and hunting that he found his métier. His love of guns and their uses in sport, along with a real feel for words and a transparent honesty that he could no more hold in check than he could hold his fiery temper, was what made O’Connor such a great writer. Most of his columns, feature articles, and books were written over the course of the three-plus decades, beginning in 1939, that he was associated with Outdoor Life. As the magazine’s shooting editor, he was insightful, opinionated, and extremely influential. Almost single-handedly, he popularized flat-shooting, smaller-caliber rifles (most notably his beloved .270). Through his columns, he led adoring readers on hunts for all the species of North American big game, on safaris in Africa, and on shikars in Asia.
O’Connor was a complex, complicated individual. A friend, Jim Rikhoff, suggested that he was “a mixture of the sensitive and the sensible, of the ribald and reflective, of insight and inspiration, of instinct and intellect.” As an author he was unquestionably a masterful stylist, and the same held true in the natty way he dressed, his feel for sportsmanship, and so many other aspects of his life.
His books are his most significant and enduring literary legacy. Here is a list of O’Connor’s books, in chronological order by date of original publication: Conquest (1930; a novel), Boom Town (1931; a novel), Game in the Desert (1939; published with a new preface in 1945 under the title Hunting in the Southwest), Hunting in the Rockies (1947), Sporting Guns (1947), The Rifle Book (1949), Hunting with a Binocular (1949), Sportsman’s Arms and Ammunition Manual (1952), The Big-Game Rifle (1952), Jack O’Connor’s Gun Book (1953), The Outdoor Life Shooting Book (1957), Complete Book of Rifles and Shotguns (1961; an excerpt was later published as 7-Lesson Rifle Shooting Course), The Big Game Animals of North America (1961), Jack O’Connor’s Big Game Hunts (1963), Complete Book of Shooting (1965), The Shotgun Book (1965), The Art of Hunting Big Game in North America (1967), Horse and Buggy West: A Boyhood on the Last Frontier (1969), The Hunting Rifle (1970), Rifle and Shotgun Shooting Basics (1986), Sheep and Sheep Hunting (1974), Game in the Desert Revisited (limited edition, 1977; trade edition, 1984), The Best of Jack O’Connor (1977), The Hunter’s Shooting Guide (1978), Hunting Big Game (1979), The Last Book: Confessions of a Gun Editor (1984), and Hunting on Three Continents with Jack O’Connor (1987). The latter two works were published posthumously.
In addition to being the sole author of the aforementioned works, O’Connor was a major contributor to a number of other books, most published or sponsored by Outdoor Life. Particularly noteworthy in this regard are his contributions to Outdoor Life’s Gallery of North American Game (1946), The Hunter’s Encyclopedia (1948), The New Hunter’s Encyclopedia (1966), and Sportsman’s Encyclopedia (1974). Selections from his writings have appeared in dozens of anthologies.
WILLIAM REICHENBACH—William Reichenbach was an exceptionally elusive figure. He does not appear in any of the standard biographical directories. Clearly he was an acquaintance of that publishing genius of the firearms world, Thomas G. Samworth, for both of Reichenbach’s books, Sixguns and Bullseyes (1936) and Automatic Pistol Marksmanship (1937), were published by Samworth’s Small-Arms Technical Publishing Company. He wrote in a chatty, engaging style, “blissfully ignoring all literary precepts” (according to Samworth), but his two books on pistols seem to be the extent of his work as an author.