{"id":4443,"date":"2017-12-04T23:05:11","date_gmt":"2017-12-05T04:05:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/?p=4443"},"modified":"2017-12-04T23:17:55","modified_gmt":"2017-12-05T04:17:55","slug":"a-few-steps-down-memory-lane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/a-few-steps-down-memory-lane\/","title":{"rendered":"A FEW STEPS DOWN MEMORY LANE"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been writing for American Handgunner <\/em>magazine for four decades now, and their old \u201cclassic\u201d issues are available online at americanhandgunner.com<\/a>.\u00a0 Lots of knowledge and history archived there.<\/p>\n

A few days ago I took a stroll down memory lane from an issue that was on the stands some thirty years past, the July-August 1987 edition<\/a>.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There was a superb insider\u2019s look at the Centimeter, a wildcat cartridge that in just three more years would be born commercially as the .40 Smith & Wesson, which was destined to quickly become the most popular police service pistol cartridge in America.\u00a0 Then-editor Cameron Hopkins did a great story on it, focusing on Paul Liebenberg, who created custom pistols for it and, when he went to work at Smith & Wesson in the Performance Center, played a leading role along with S&W\u2019s Tom Campbell in convincing S&W to manufacture the guns and Winchester to produce the cartridge. There was a corollary article on it by Whit Collins, who had worked with Jeff Cooper to create the similar .40 G&A for a Guns & Ammo <\/em>magazine project years earlier.\u00a0 Liebenberg later told me that he thought Whit Collins never got the credit he deserved for creating the Centimeter that morphed into the .40 S&W. (Liebenberg and Collins predicted that the Centimeter could be the most popular cartridge in IPSC action shooting competition, and that pretty much happened, though it was called .40 S&W by then.)<\/p>\n

I had an essay in there on hunting (the original title of which had been \u201cConfessions of a Part-Time Handgun Hunter,\u201d and an insider look at a project I had done with one of the great S&W revolversmiths of all time, Andy Cannon.\u00a0 We had created what might have been the ideal police service revolver\u2026at about the time law enforcement was sending revolvers to the police museum and turning en masse to semiautomatic service pistols.\u00a0 We lost Andy much too soon to cancer. I still cherish my Andy Cannon guns, including my prototype of those \u201cAyoob\/Cannon Street L\u201d .357 Magnums.\u00a0 IIRC, I shot it at Bianchi Cup that year.<\/p>\n

My \u201cAyoob Files\u201d that issue focused on an Indianapolis case where a cop struggled with a thug, each trying to get the other\u2019s gun away from him. (Spoiler: the cop, a part-time Marion County deputy who was working security at the time, won.) It was one of two cases that prompted me to later develop and teach a disarming\/retention technique for that situation.<\/p>\n

It brought back a lot of memories, and might do the same for my fellow old farts, and give younger folks a taste of 20th<\/sup> Century American gun culture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been writing for American Handgunner magazine for four decades now, and their old \u201cclassic\u201d issues are available online at americanhandgunner.com.\u00a0 Lots of knowledge and history archived there. A few days ago I took a stroll down memory lane from an issue that was on the stands some thirty years past, the July-August 1987 edition. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":6428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-4443","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4443"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4443\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4446,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4443\/revisions\/4446"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}