When I was a little boy, my dad was always teaching me gun safety, and when you are small, you really don’t pay a lot of attention. When I was a teenager, Dad made the point a little stronger. He said, “Boy if I ever come by when we are out, and I check your safety and it is off your gun, you are going to have a very very bad day.”
Was that tough love, probably but it may have saved me or someone I was hunting with, their life. I couldn’t count the times he asked me, boy how is that safety, believe me, I checked that safety often.
I can still hear dad’s voice ringing in my ears.
He and I were born and raised over in Nicholas County West Virginia. In an area most people are familiar with, there is a barn at the Pool and Runa Road intersection, and across the front of that barn says, “Drunker’s Roost.”
According to my dad, he named and wrote that on the barn when he was a young man, and it has stuck for decades.
Dad was from the old school, where actions, speak louder than words.
I remember when I was still going to school, we had no heat in the house at night. The water in the water bucket was mostly frozen, but you could always get a little out. My dad said, “Donnie, time to get up for school.” I just lay there and fell back to sleep. The next thing I know, I have ice-cold water going down the back of my neck. That was the worst feeling that I had ever had in my life. He took a dipper of half-frozen water and let a few drops go down the back of my neck. Tough Love, probably, but I had the cleanest neck in town, and was never late for school, Lol. From then on, all he had to do was just rattle that dipper in the bucket and I jumped to my feet.
My father kept me hunting or fishing almost every weekend and sometimes even during the week until I was in my 20s. I was the youngest of five children and by the time I was 10 years old, all my siblings were out on their own. Finally, I said, “Dad, I’m not going fishing with you this weekend, you know, I’m 20 years old and basically never had a girlfriend, I have spent it all with you hunting and fishing.” Dad looked at me and said, “Boy, are you afraid you’re going to miss out on something?” I said, “yes!!”
He never said another word.
I got on with my life and most of it was getting in trouble. He continued with his, just like he had done since he was a little boy, trapping, hunting and fishing.
He was an avid outdoorsman. After I married he and I continued to hunt and fish together, it was that way up to his death at 87 years old.
Dad probably taught me the greatest object lesson about gun safety accidentally. I learned a lesson that I will never forget. Let me tell you the story.
When I was a teenager, Dad and I was hunting late one evening, we were in a huge field with trees, he said, “You go over there about 100 yards away and find a good spot and I will go this way to where we can still see each other. We’ll see if we can get us a nice buck.”
I could see him sitting over in the field, with his favorite gun, he nicknamed it “Old Sweetie.” For some reason, my dad always thought that gun just fell out of heaven one day. It was a Remington 742 automatic, 6MM. I probably could not count all the deer he and I put on the ground with it.
It was about dark and I heard what sounded like an incoming mortar round, it made the weirdest sound. There was a little bang and then a big bang, I looked over in the middle of the field and there was my dad laid out on his back not moving a muscle. I felt sure he was dead, I was dreading going to see.
I ran and as I got closer, I could see he was breathing, his face and eyes were full of dirt, I wallered him around and finally got him set up. I tried to clean the dirt out of his eyes so he could see and he was bleeding from the explosion.
What appeared to have happened, he put the barrel of the gun in or near the ground and was bent over facing the ground, he used it as a cane to get up, and evidently with the “safety off”, pulled the trigger. It blew him about 4 feet backward, there was a hole in the ground about the size of a water bucket.
To make things worse, it had blown a rock about the size of one of your feet out and it was laying about 5 feet away. It appeared it had hit him in the upper body, but didn’t look like anything was broken.
Once I got him where he could talk, and his eyes cleared out where he could see, the only thing he could say was, can you believe what a hole Old Sweetie blew, just imagine if that was a deer. Yes, Old Sweetie had done it for him again. He was so proud of that gun, lol.
I always felt Dad knew he shouldn’t have left that safety off, especially knowing he was always on me about it.
Little did he know, I would never forget this object lesson for the rest of my life!!
As far as I know, we never mentioned it again, not even to Mom.
Before he died, I had the gun engraved with a gold tag that said, “Old Sweetie”
