Orphan Annie and her cousins revisited
 

Reposted here at the request of Mike Franzen...

https://i.imgur.com/Dpzg7XJl.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/MUYAocRl.jpg

No matter where you post them, they’re mighty fine.

WARNING PHIL: BEWARE of the "DRAGON" :nono:

Attachment 113125

Phil, have you figured out whether Orphan Annie is Dick Baldwin's old gun? How many 27" single traps could there be?

Bill, it seems like some circumstantial evidence is there but nothing you could take to court. Annie does have an unengraved gold-colored oval inlayed in the stock, and there's an oval showing on Dick's. Dick's has what appears to me to be a Hawkins pad; Annie has a plexi spacer under a more recent pad which could be evidence of the stock having been shortened at some point. But I've exhausted all the directions I know to go; nobody I've found seems to know anything about my gun, nor what ever happened to Dick's.

I haven’t looked but does TPS have a count of 27” barrel guns? Anyone care to opine on why anyone would specify 27”?

They’re certainly rare to say the least Mike. The Parker Story will have a total in the grades section though.
Mine’s not a SBT but I have a documented 16 ga. D Lifter with 27” Parker-made Laminated Steel barrels… unique in this configuration.





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A pic in Dick Baldwin's book shows him as a youngster shooting a Parker SC with an obviously shorter barrel. When I first bought Annie most folks agreed that the rib treatment at the muzzle was not Parker work, so the assumption was that the barrel had been shortened. But as I wrote in PP, the choke measures full so...? My letter shows that Annie left the factory with a 34" barrel. As I recall TPS lists a few 28" SBTs but no 27's.

Now that is a cool picture!

The real question is, will she break trap targets consistently? If the answer is yes, then who cares? Except for the curiosity factor, of course.

It would be really cool if you could tie her back to a young Dick Baldwin.

Having found an orphaned 32" barrel for her courtesy of a member here which pretty well buckled up to her that's the one I've been shooting her with, though in truth she did quite well with the shorty. I have noticed that though her short barrel carries all the proper stampings and the numbers match throughout, the font used to stamp the barrel is different than used on the rest of the gun; in fact it's very much like the font used on the orphaned barrel, some 5,000 #'s newer. I think it's very possible that Dick had the short barrel made for the gun at Parker, but no way to prove it that I know of. And if that's the case, I wonder what happened to her original barrel; maybe it's kicking around somewhere :shock:!

Post her number and we'll be on the lookout.