From the beginning I guess. I had a hunting Grandfather and a hunting Uncle, but neither lived in my hometown. Dad loved to fish but was never much of a hunter other than a dove shoot now and then. Far back as I can remember a side by side was my vision of a proper shotgun.

My interest in guns and hunting goes back as far as I can remember. My birthday and Christmas presents were always cowboy pistols or 'Davy Crockett' replicas complete with the outfits. Loved that coonskin hat.

The toys were replaced by the BB-guns and the big yards of our homes (yup, a sort of family compound) on the outskirts of town became my hunting grounds. The chicken pen was my bird field and sparrows were my specialty. Songbirds were technically off limits but the distinction was blurred. The giant oaks around the yard held untold numbers of gray squirrels and rarely some big game in the form of a possum. I recall 4 coveys of wild quail in the immediate area.

I had an elderly maiden Aunt next door who grew up on a plantation on the Tombigbee river in Alabama in the 1870s. She told me tales of the men hunting in the river bottoms, taught me to clean the birds, and then cooked them for my friends and I.

Finally at about age 10 my Mom relented and allowed me to have the standard issue (for boys in my area) Stevens model 94-Y youth sized four-ten. Some may have the opinion that the .410 is too little gun to train a boy to hunt with, but when you're the boy in question and you compare the "real gun" .410 with the series of BB-guns I'd had you'd believe you had some real fire power.

The .410 gave way to my Mom's 20ga Remington deluxe Model 31 pump gun as a hand me down. That particular gun had a bent barrel from the time she fell into a gully up on my Granddad's middle GA farm. Until I figured out where it shot it was useless on a sitting bird but surprisingly deadly on right to left crossers on a dove field. No lead one way double lead required in the opposite direction, and hold to the right on a sitter.

When I was 14 and having little luck killing ducks with the open bored 20ga I became convinced that a proper 12ga gun was necessary to my happiness in life. I had settled on a Stevens 311 but my birthday resulted in a 12ga Ithaca model 37 pumpgun. I used it for 30 years as my regular gun but always had a double in mind.

I got to trading guns at about fourteen. Some of my friends had guns and we'd swap .22 rifles and such. I built up a 'stock' of .22s most of which had something wrong with them, and the .410s my buddies were now ashamed of owning and other odds and ends. That trading resulted in my first sxs, a 12ga B-model Savage Fox which was almost the end of my doublegun fantasy.

We had an old fellow in the country around here who was a sure-nuff gun trader and who had a wonderful Winchester collection. We'd catch rides out to his gun room after school and get fingerprints all over his collection.

I worked up a trade with him, getting rid of the rest of the broke .22s, the .410s including my first real gun, Mom's bent barrel model 31 20ga pump, and that terrible Fox. In exchange I got my first "good gun", an L. C. Smith 20ga field grade. It felt like it had grown out of my hands as a part of my body...and I couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with it!

Dismayed, I did not take the time to become used to the "Elsie" or learn to shoot with it and was back to trading. It went along with a 44.40 Colt SA to acquire another double from the gun trader, this time a 16ga English side by side made by Wesley Richards. When I brought it home my Dad said it was too nice for a kid and took it away from me. That seemed fair at the time especially since the Colt SA I traded was his. He shot it for doves the rest of his life.

Except for a useless Spanish .410 sxs I bought out of a barrel full of them while in college in Macon Ga in the '60s, I shot my Model 37 Ithaca pump until my mid forties. A divorce and the suddenly single man experience of having some money no one else was spending for me led me back to my search for the perfect double.

I've been buying them ever since, selling or trading out the surplus in the herd. I've sort of settled on a low grade Parker 16ga which I shoot well enough for quail, an English 12ga E. M. Reilly for dove and a couple of tight choked Ansley Fox's for the local wood ducks and ringnecks. Still buy one now and then...Geo