Answering Ray's question about the gun I probably shouldn't have had refinished. When I was 14 years old, in 1960, I bought a really nice little VH 28 gauge from another 14 year old in my gun club. I paid him the price of a new Savage 99 that he wanted, $130 if I recall correctly. The gun had a pretty perfect stock with checkering filled with varnish, perfect buttplate, very high condition barrel blue, no colors and good screws. In the summer of 1967, I met a more than sweet young thing at Ocean City, New Jersey. She lived in Jenkintown, so in the fall I took the Parker to Paul Jaeger's shop to have the checkering redone and visit Jannie Broughton. At that point, the gun was just short of pristine. However, I guess it was my Dad who wanted to take a trip to Del Grego's to get some work done on a 16 gauge GHE. This was in 1972 and somehow we decided for him to take the 28 gauge along. This is the trip where Dad took the pictures of Larry and Babe working in the shop, pictures that appeared in Kevin McCormack's 1997 DGJ articles on the Del Gregos. My 28 came back from Del Grego with new colors and new rust blue. It is a beautiful gun, with more than 40 years of clay targets and bird hunting on the new finish, finish it probably didn't need. In three years, I will have owned that gun for 56 years, the same number of years it was owned by its previous caretakers. I'm running out of time to wear those Remington colors off.
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