A Blast From The Past
 

A buddy of mine gave me this box of shells yesterday at the club.Early Winchester plastic shells. Pretty cool stuff. 1 1/4oz. of 4's in a 16 gauge. There is only 13 shells left in the box so somebody had some fun.

Mr. Murphy please note the store on the price tag It says Tideland Easton ,Maryland...do they still exist? How do ya suppose they got all the way to New England?

I just picked up 8 boxes of winchester superx and 1 box of remington express paper shells with the new crimp at a local gun show.

Tideland Sports was a medium to upscale outdoor store that sold guns, tweedy mens stuff, and also women's clothes. It was on Route 50, directly across the road from the Comfort Inn. A friend and I cried over a brand new Model 21 Duck gun that we missed out on at Tideland about twenty or twenty five years ago. About five years ago, I found the same gun in a gun store in Annapolis, still mint and unused, and bought it for a thousand dollars less than it was offered for at Tideland nearly twenty years earlier. The buyer must have passed away and the survivors put his guns up for sale "up the road". Tideland has been closed about fifteen or twenty years. The first Remington plastics were 1960 or 1961. The Winchesters followed fairly soon after.

The owner of Tideland was a sallow-faced local who had the personality of a toadfish. When I tried to buy 10 dozen field Canada goose decoys from him and casually asked if there was a discount for cash, he told me in an annoyed voice, "I don't give discounts; I'm not in the business of selling myself short." He had a great-looking daughter who helped out at the store from time to time and was a natural salesperson in addition to being very attractive. But he would never let her deal direct with people on any merchandise like guns, ammo, hunting clothing or accessories, etc. because he didn't think she had the product knowledge. After a while the daughter got tired of it and quit working there altogether. Tideland was the first place I ever saw Larry Baer's original 2-volume set on the Parker Gun, also a full cardboard case (500 rnds.) of the old red and yellow-boxed Winchester Western 10 ga. 2 7/8" shells loaded in #5 shot. The local old-timers bought them for duck shooting; probably a third of them went down the barrels of Damascus guns. After Albrights Gun Shop opened in downtown Easton, complete with a resident gunsmith upstairs from the store, Tideland didn't last long.

Good loads, the Mark 5 stuff is a favorite of mine.

Somebody was probably down there duck shooting on the Eastern Shore and ran out of cartridges so they picked up a box locally.

I actually just bought 3 boxes of this same load in #2 shot on GunBroker yesterday.

Destry

Destry, that would be a passable load for my #3 frame 16 gauge VH.

Thanks guy's for a little history on Tideland. Interesting stuff.

Another Tideland story. In the early '80's I cashed out a CD and went to Easton with a pocketfull of cash to buy a gun. I was 24 and that money was burning a whole in my pocket. I stopped at Tideland and the fellow there wouldn't let me handle any of the guns. I guess he figured I was wasting his time. He asked if I was going to buy anything and I told him not without handling it, but he still refused. So I stopped at Albright's next and Larry Albright invited me to go behind the counter and handle anything I like. Of course I left there with a nice English gun that I still have. That Tideland guy deserved to go under.

I have another Tideland story, but I can't tell it here. It doesn't involve guns or shells. It is more about the bathing suit department and a couple of "nice people" a friend and I met there one summer afternoon.

Well?