"You're a Good Shooter"

"With Practice, You Could Be Great"

That is quite a compliment coming from Chuck.   He does not give them out that easily.

In the very small world of legal Chicago pistol shooting and training the name Chuck is well enough known not to need any other introduction.

And likewise Chuck knows the name Haggerty who was my instructor, and can go on at length as to his style and the problems under which  he operated.

I just had to requalify because one of my shooting cards is coming up for renewal, on a worknight after a worknight, coming off the midnight shift, and the range where Chuck operates is at 142nd and Western, over forty miles from where I live. Through heavy traffic from the Northwest suburbs to the South Side.

At five pm on a Friday evening. That's commonly called "Rush Hour," which is kind of a quaint phrase from some time back in the twenties when some of the other hours must not have also been  rush hour, but it is still the worst hour for traffic, that and the other one right after it, which I was just in.

So I did 81 miles of that plus fired on the range, and absorbed useful pointers about trigger pull, sight picture, when to not shoot, two-handed grip, up to the butt--yes there is one--and talked intelligently about how pistol training was done back in the day, and got back in time to get ready for work in two hours and 45 minutes, and still haven't calculated as to whether that could be mathematically legal or not.  I think it is mathematically possible.

Unless you take out nine minutes for the Mickey Dees at the Hinsdale Oasis on the Tri-State. These roads are famously shown in the movie The Blues Brothers, and I think they even stopped at that Oasis.

With all these millions of people driving around, I still can't get over that I found the one guy who can still talk knowledgably about the legendary Haggerty. That class  must have been twenty years ago, as I look back now on what must have happened which year and because of what.

I still remember Haggerty had a reloading station set up in his living room so he could watch TV while he did reloads.

I got a 95, and my glasses are several years past their prescription date. One round went two inches to the right of the target's chest, and would have probably got his arm anyway.

That's nothing, one time in the army I had broken glasses, so broken that there was no lens on my usual right-handed shooting eye side, and I had to make do with only a left lens, while the right side swung free in the open air. But unfortunately for me, the left side had no crossbar from the frame to the left ear, so I had to attach a suitable twig off the ground with a piece of duct tape. That is Double Broke.

That was using an M-16A1 which would drop hot brass down your shirt front left-handed, without a left-handed brass deflector, and being right-handed most of the time I didn't think to get one, so that did happen a couple times. Still, I am proud that I shot Expert under those conditions, left-handed. They really should lower the price of glasses for us poor folks so we can get them more often.

Anyway I have noticed I seem to shoot at billiards better left-handed too. It's a useful skill sometimes.

What I shot tonight was a Smith and Wesson Model 67 .38 Special, which is a six-shot double-action revolver, I think a J-frame, and a four -inch barrel, which might have been a bull barrel but I didn't really look that closely.  Don't even ask what was in the rounds, it was whatever Chuck provided.

If I get new glasses too then look out. I gone tink abou getting some.

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