Earlier today I was groping around in the dark corner of a seldom used closet and felt a heavy box. I pulled it out to see it was labeled SKB, and I thought, "What the?" I openned it and found the old 12 ga. single barrel from my father's childhood.
The gun is a Bridge, and the only other one I've seen was over 50 yrs. ago in the FBI building. Working from a parts list from Numrich and the '32 Stoeger catalog, it's a dead ringer for the H&R #7.
Anyway, he and his brother had bought it in the early twenties. Today, the barrel retains 99% of the blue, the bore is bright as new, and the action is tight. The stock is either a freakishly tight grained walnut or, I suspect, something like gum. Tell me I'm wrong. The finish on the stock is poor, large portions of the lacquer chipped away, especially on the forward edge of the forearm and the lower surfaces of the buttstock. That part of the wear is consistent with a lot of time spent in the brush in pursuit of rabbits and birds. Both he and his brother told tales of filling bushel baskets with game for school-benefit dinners and of irking their father by going through the family's stock of shotgun shells and not telling him the supply was wholly depleted.
The part I find most interesting is that the receiver still has probably 90% of the case colors. By rights, the case colors should be gone. The only way I can imagine this is that when the boys went into the field the gun was always at port arms, ready for action. Hard to imagine that there was enough game in those days that you didn't traverse the fields languidly holding the gun at your side, hands around the receiver.
The other gun that could talk is my great-great grandfather's P. Webley hammer gun that the boys took into the field along with the Bridge, but that's for another day.
