Guns and Family

A while ago I sat for a few hours in front of my computer with my father’s old World War II pistol. I looked up the markings online and found it is a 1911A1 model built by United Switch and Signal of Pennsylvania. They made 55,000 of them for the US Navy during the war. Only one other company, Singer Sewing Machine made fewer. The quality was very good with only two pistols being rejected. From what I found online its value as a collector item is between 1,500 and 4,500.  As dad shot his a lot his would be at the low end.

As a shooter it’s not great. I love the gun and the way it points, feels, I even like the boom and recoil, but honestly, I have trouble hitting the target with it. It does what it should, puts big holes in things at close range, but I can buy lots of replica pistols that have modern improvements to make them more accurate, and I can buy them at half the price.

Where the value of the gun really lies is in its story. My dad’s best friend is Wilmer Anderton. He was a young man in the Navy at the end of WWII and he was approached by a soldier who wanted to go home, and wanted to go on Wilmer’s ship. Wilmer was the captain’s yeoman on a transport carrier. They ferried planes and men to the action from the United States. He told Wilmer if he got him on the list to ship home he would make it worth his while. Of course Wilmer had no intention of trying to manipulate the list, the captain or anything else, but being a hard scrabble farming kid from Utah he didn’t say anything about that. The soldier did make the list and true to his word he met with Wilmer and handed over a nice .45 caliber pistol, still in cosmoline.

Wilmer came home and the pistol came with him. He met a pretty young nurse named Kathleen when he had Typhus. She walked in with a shot in her hand and said, “Turn over”. Wilmer said she must have liked what she saw because she married him. He traded the pistol to my dad for two field jackets after the war. Dad was still in the National Guard.

Wilmer’s pretty young wife and he took my dad to a dance in a nearby town, where Kathleen introduced her niece Janice to my father. So in an odd way, my parent’s courtship has a .45 and two field jackets in it. Not wine and roses, but in my mind better.