Friday, Jul 4, 2008
Dec 22, 2000 | One of my happiest childhood memories is sitting around the kitchen table on a quiet evening with my father and little brother, playing Russian roulette.
This family bonding experience was made possible by Mattel, makers of the Fanner 50, a Western-style pistol designed to work like a real revolver. Open the loading gate, drop in six spring-loaded brass cartridges called Shootin' Shells and gray plastic bullets would fire out the barrel at eyepopping velocity. By affixing a circular Greenie Stickem Cap on the base of each shell, you got a loud report and real gunsmoke each time you put the barrel to your temple and blew yourself away.
By golly, they don't make toys like that anymore. It sounds pretty sick today, but we were a close family. My dad had four sons, none of whom grew up to be soldiers, cops, criminals or gun nuts. None of us ever became hunters, either, but perhaps we got it out of our system early, because every Christmas morning we'd hunt our dad like an animal, armed with the dart guns we always found stuffed in our stockings. Our quarry was hopelessly outnumbered, but he had learned survival tactics from Imperial Japanese Marines in places called Guam, Saipan and Tinian. Even so, one time I was able to sneak up on him and shoot him in the back with a rubber-tipped dart. He was so proud.
These battles raged for days, until we lost all our ammunition. At night, just at the point of slumber, I could picture a dart heading straight for my forehead, and I'd bolt awake, heart pounding.
Most of the war toys in those days were hideously dangerous, but back then, nobody seemed to notice. This was 1959, even before Lawn Darts. It would not have occurred to the average person to contact a lawyer over some obviously self-inflicted injury, nor would a reasonable jury reward the stupidity of dummies who copped a hemorrhage off a child's toy. You paid your money and took your chances, and Darwin take the hindmost. Times have changed a lot, obviously.
Let me sketch in some background. We had just moved up to Oregon from Southern California, hugging the rocky coastline until the sun was a dim memory of warmth. At first we were so poor that I foraged for huckleberries to augment my breakfast of lumpy boiled oatmeal and hot chocolate, both burnt on a wood cookstove. I recall a squalor that would have shocked Steinbeck and a crushing poverty, but we were happy. Late at night, we could hear our parents laughing in their room.
The small towns of the Oregon backwoods were extremely violent places. Loggers had regularly scheduled fistfights downtown on Saturday nights, and as a child of beatniks, I was beaten like a rented mule by their spawn, my new classmates. The very name Doyle Scroggins still makes my fists ball up involuntarily, although I am indebted to him for punching me out daily until I learned to fight back. But not once did I ever imagine shooting him or any of my other schoolyard chums with a firearm; my rich fantasy life had no bearing on ugly old Reality.
This was long before television began to blur those lines, showing real firefights in Vietnam on the evening news and fake ones in America later in prime time. Death-by-gunfire became a central theme on every dramatic TV show, spamming an entire generation with bloodshed.
On Christmas Day, 1960, I ripped open my present and found a complete kit of weapons, a set that Mattel dubbed the "Buffalo Hunter." It consisted of a long rifle called a "saddle gun," a Fanner 50 and holster, plus a plastic knife so obviously bogus that I immediately gave it to my brother Jon. These things in the original box would easily fetch upwards of $1,500 at an auction today. The plastic knife alone would be worth $100.
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