[Kevin McCormack]

It is problematic whether Hedderly ever had anything at all done to these (his) guns over time so car as stock alterations, rebluing or re case-coloring goes. His writings, which I have researched exhaustively, seldom mention at all having a gun refinished let alone repaired. At best, he mentions on occasion having a set of barrels honed or polished out or the forcing cones relieved to improve patterns, a subject on which he became a fanatic.

The guns I have been able to verify via written record ordered either for himself or his duck club and trapshooting buddies were delivered spot on so far as chokes, chambers, frame sizes, barrel lengths and options (e.g., Monte Carlo stock, cheek piece, rib configurations, etc.

Hedderly was, as they liked to say in Kansas when I lived there, "a long drink of water" - he was a tall (6 foot 6 inch) gaunt-framed man with a long neck and a chiseled face, most worthy of the anatomical term "lantern jawed." He ordered his stocks at 15 1/2 and on at least one occasion 15 3/4 LOP. His utopic duck gun was envisioned, ordered, built, and when delivered, a 32' barreled DHE 28 gauge, straight grip, SKBP with no safety. After he shot his first couple of limits with it, he dubbed it "The Mosquito Gun."

He ran through a number of American makers with his design criteria for a smallbore duck gun that "could", and eventually settled on Parker Bros.
(There is no doubt in my mind that chumming up the good Col. DuBray in custom ordering the first couple of guns for use on the marsh greased the skids, so to speak, along with his (Hedderly's) gushes about how accommodating Parker was in adhering to order specs and quality of the final delivered item having met his wishes).

He became a hard charger proponent of small gauge guns for duck shooting chiefly for 3 reasons: (1) during the heyday of the CA duck clubs (c. 1909-1919), killing ducks with a 12 gauge had been reduced to a routine, mundane, and boring pastime (there were plenty of ducks and plenty of duck clubs; something new was needed; (2) ammunition was unbelievably cheap and, for that matter, the price of ordering out a custom-spec smallbore gun from Parker Bros., LC Smith, Lefever, Fox, Ithaca, whomever was proportionally cheap as well, given the near non-existent market for smallbore guns, and (3) a smallbore long-barreled duck gun that delivered the goods on the marsh quickly became a trendy vanity item amongst the ricefield glitterati.

Despite the hype maintained at a near-fever pitch by Hedderly from about 1912 to 1916, relatively very few smallbore long-barreled Parker guns were ordered and built specifically for duck or trap shooting by Parker Bros; the last time I took a really accurate count combing through his references in Western Field magazine of these types of guns (excluding the well-known Widgeon Club duck guns), the total was less than a dozen individual guns.

At Hedderly's own rendition, the factors that killed the smallbore duck gun revolution during this era were the extreme scarcity of smallbore ammunition on the West coast in any semblance of an array to select cartridges based on use (e.g., duck, upland, or clay target loads), and the near total absence of quality reloading components in any volume selection to enable economical shooting of the little guns.