I know that this is off topic but I thought that some of you might be interested. I spent an enjoyable couple of hours yesterday with a old friend, Ross Beard. For those of you who don't know about Ross here is a very brief biography:
Ross was fortunate to meet Marshall "Carbine" Williams a number of years before Carbine passed away. Ross's initials are R.E.B.
Carbine didn't want to even talk with Ross until he saw those initials on Ross's belt. Ross later went on to write Carbine's biography "CARBINE" several years before Jimmie Stewart played him in the movies. I had found a very nice handmade & tooled flap holster with the initials "R.E.B." on the flap at a local gun show and presented it yesterday to Ross who was thrilled with it.
Ross grew up in Florence , South Carolina and was a neighbor of Melvin Purvis, the G-Man who took down John Dillinger outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago. As a kid he got to spend a lot of time with Purvis and was put in charge of cleaning Purvis' extensive gun collection. He was a contributor to a new book about Purvis, "VENDETTA", written by Purvis' son Alston which has just been made into a movie to be out this summer. The book and the movie centers around the love/hate relationship between Melvin Purvis and J. Edgar Hoover.
Ross has accumulated a vast gun collection over the roughly fifty years that I have known him. He has some original examples of Carbine Williams' guns including the one that he made as a child. He also has a sawed off Parker that belonged to Dillinger and the 1911 Colt that belonged to Melvin Purvis. He has generously donated a large part of his collection to the new Military Museum established at the South Carolina Nation Guard Armoury on Bluff Road here in Columbia. Admission is free and well worth a visit if you happen to be in the area.
Best Regards, George
