Widgeon Club's guns
 

I know these guns get both discussed and shown here now and then, so i thought someone might be interested

there is a small article in the new issue of Wildfowl about the California clubs of the early 1900- its printed over a photo of two open cars festooned with geese and loaded with hunters displaying their double guns and pumps.

the article mentions the Widgeon club's special order of 32 inch 20ga Parkers on 1 frames, adding that one was ordered with an extra set of barrel in 28ga.

i do like hearing about those duck club guns especially one of those long barrel 20 gauges who knows maybe they even hunted ducks with the 28 ga set of barrels. what a storey that would make...charlie

Edwin Hedderly, then editor of Western Field wrote extensively on his testing and waterfowling with long barrel small bore guns during 1911. He got some killer long barrel Parker small bores built especially for him with outrageously long stocks, in exchange for Parker Bros. advertising in his magazine. One of our members was working on transcribing all of Hedderly's material and publishing it, back before I retired and left the DC area, now over a decade ago. One of Hedderly's A1-Specials was pictured in Larry Baer's first book, page 26, and on the cover of the September 1966 Guns & Ammo.

I wish our member with all of the Hedderly research material would publish. It should be beyond interesting. I have a picture of Hedderly holding his 32" 16 gauge, but that is the extent of my research material.

So do I. Funny how life's everyday things get in the way of fondest wished and dreams. When the wicker cornucopia finally spews forth, all of the above will come to pass and be well worth waiting for.

OK, I'll bite. What was the purported allure of using a long barreled small bore gun in this situation?

The Wigeon Duck Club was in the middle of the largest duck flyaway in North America.
Bagging birds was easy. 12 gauge was no longer a challenge.

Parker salesman Arthur W. DuBray was known in California as "The Father of the Twenty Gauge". He was a popular hunter and competition shooter, but above all, a salesman.

Hedderly wrote often in "Forest and Stream" of his theories and often mentioned Parkers that he had built.Somewhere I have some bound volumes of F&S from about 1905 t0 1930 that have some of these articles.Wish he would have mentioned serial numbers...

Kevin I'd get to work on this if you want to be first to publish. A friend in California has all of the articles and is working on them literally as we speak. He's doing it from the specialty ammunition angle, but it's still all the same information.

Destry