Keith, this is a great thread jOe started and what an interesting start on vintage guns you got. Lucky you.
Yes James, every trip to that old gunsmith's shop was either entertaining or educational. But who knew, at age 14, that every ex-German soldier who emigrated to the U.S. was a Nazi war criminal? I was probably quite irresponsible, at age 14, for not contacting Simon Wisenthal and his Nazi hunters to bring this war criminal to justice. His wife, who took care of most of the paperwork, did look and sound something like Hitler whenever she was screaming at him, so who knows what dark sinister secrets he was hiding?
I was always under the impression, that when the German Wermacht took their Blitzkrieg storming through neighboring countries, they disarmed all of the conquered civilian populace.
What a great forum this is!
I've sometimes thought it might be interesting to start a Thread about unusual gun shops, and old Gene's place was certainly one of them. Over the years, I got to know him pretty well, and he took the time to teach me some gunsmithing techniques such as spring making and tempering. I wish I'd gotten him to teach me more. He was very old school, and had several gallon jugs of Sperm Whale Oil for his tempering, long after that product became impossible to get due to restrictions on whaling. Red hot steel quenched in whale oil has a very distinctive smell. Almost every time I went there, I'd walk out laughing or shaking my head. Imagine being in a quiet gun shop looking at a rack of used guns, while the gunsmith was at the other end of the store examining a customers malfunctioning .30-06. Then without any warning, he poked the barrel down and fired a test shot into a hole in the floor, down into a large box of sand in the basement. That was mild compared to a few other things I saw there. The story about him and the loaded Broomhandle Mauser full automatic pistol he kept under the counter for robbers comes to mind...
