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    Dead Aim
    Dead Aim
    Dead Aim
    Ebook114 pages1 hour

    Dead Aim

    By Lee Echols

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    About this ebook

    First published in 1951, this book recounts the nostalgic antics of hell-raising pistol shooters of the 1930’s.

    It is complete and unexpurgated and is the hot blasts of mirth from the shaky guns of Lee Echols, who fired for many years before World War II with the U.S. Treasury Department Pistol Team.

    Lee Echols’ stock-in-trade was the business of making a pistol go whangety-bang with a fair degree of accuracy. However, this always had to take a back seat to his hell-raising antics and inspired tom-foolery, which had him known as the Clown Prince of pistoleers on every range in the Western Hemisphere.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBorodino Books
    Release dateJun 28, 2017
    ISBN9781787205673
    Dead Aim
    Author

    Lee Echols

    Lee Echols (1907-1994) was born in Oklahoma and grew up in Calexico, Imperial County, California. He served in the OSS and the CIA, and was a special Customs agent for undercover narcotics work. He was a Navy officer in New York City and special State Department operative in Guatemala, Bolivia, Uruguay, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic. He spoke Spanish fluently. He was also a member of the U.S. Treasury Pistol Team and won the National Pistol Championship in 1941 at the Camp Perry Shoot. He served as western field director for the National Rifle Association for several years. After retirement from 38 years of government service, he helped organize the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, which had been started by his old friend, Dave Phillips, who had been Chief of the western hemisphere section of the CIA. Echols became California State chairman of AFIO. Known for his sense of humour, Echols published his first book, Dead Aim in 1951, in which recounts the various shooting matches in which he participated over the years. In 1990 he published his autobiography, Hilarious High Jinks & Dangerous Assignments, which details his career and outlines some of the many practical jokes he and his associates played on each other. He also wrote numerous magazines articles. Echols died in 1994 at a hospital near his home in Bonita, California, aged 87.

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      Book preview

      Dead Aim - Lee Echols

      This edition is published by BORODINO BOOKS – www.pp-publishing.com

      To join our mailing list for new titles or for issues with our books – borodinobooks@gmail.com

      Or on Facebook

      Text originally published in 1951 under the same title.

      © Borodino Books 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

      Publisher’s Note

      Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

      We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

      DEAD AIM

      By

      LEE ECHOLS

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      Contents

      TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

      INTRODUCTION by C. A. (Smitty) Brown 4

      PREFACE 6

      CHAPTER ONE — AN ODD CREATURE 8

      CHAPTER TWO — BOMBASTIC WATERBAGS 10

      CHAPTER THREE — TROPICAL SUBTERFUGE 14

      CHAPTER FOUR — THE NIGHT BEFORE THE MATCH 18

      CHAPTER FIVE — THE GREAT KETCHUP DECEPTION 24

      CHAPTER SIX — FLORIDA FELONS AND A FLUTTERY FLIGHT 27

      CHAPTER SEVEN — HOT BRASS AND A ROUGH-TONGUED DOG 30

      CHAPTER EIGHT — RED BLOOD AND BLACK WATER 32

      CHAPTER NINE — SALVOS IN GUATEMALA 35

      CHAPTER TEN — A FRIEND OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN 41

      CHAPTER ELEVEN — THE BIG RINSE 44

      CHAPTER TWELVE — UNWELCOME GUESTS 48

      CHAPTER THIRTEEN — INDIAN CASUALTY AND A BORDER INCIDENT 53

      CHAPTER FOURTEEN — A LOUISIANA EMBALMER 56

      CHAPTER FIFTEEN — THE SCREAM OF THE SIMMERMACHER PANTHER 61

      CHAPTER SIXTEEN — A TROUBLESOME OLD MAN 66

      REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 70

      INTRODUCTION by C. A. (Smitty) Brown

      AT LONG LAST HERE’S A FUNNY BOOK ABOUT THE FUNNIEST people on earth, the pistol shooters. Lee Echols pistol shooters seem to have even more harrowing experiences than the ones I know about but that may be because Echols is more observing. The ones I know about are bad enough, God knows.

      I first cut Echols’ sign at Florida in 1938 when he came up from Puerto Rico as a firing member of the U.S. Treasury Pistol Team. He had a harmonica with him that talked for him when his pistol didn’t, and it wasn’t long before he and his Treasury shooters were breaking world’s records all over the place. He broke the World’s Center Fire Timed Fire record that year at Savannah, and the next year bowled over the .45 Short National record. His team broke records from 1938 until 1941 which are still standing in the record books for all to see and fire at. I remember too well when Echols rubbed out my possibility of a National Individual Pistol Championship when I posted a 280, only to have it soundly beaten in the last relay by him with a 283.

      Physically, Echols is an odder looking bird than any of the characters he depicts in his writings. He stands around with his collar full of chins and a dreamy, bed-roomy look about him, augmented a great deal by his eyelids which have the appearance of feathered Venetian blinds. When he walks he seems to have a pogo stick in each heel, and his arms start swinging like Angel Firpo working on a sand bag. He is round like a flour barrel and his pants hang from his pelvis like monks cloth drapes in a haunted house.

      Conversationally he is a complete bust and if that nasal Oklahoma twang of his is the King’s English, then the queen ought to take him aside and talk to him about it.

      In DEAD AIM, against a background of hell-raising pistol shooters in all sorts of outlandish situations and dilemmas, Echols has brought a rich and perceptive humor to a great and ever growing sport.

      This is a book for gaiety and laughter, and to savor the full humor of this strange man, relax and read it.

      PREFACE

      IN PREPARING A BOOK ON PISTOL SHOOTING THE CARDINAL requisites are a solid working knowledge of ballistics and an acute understanding of the mechanical functions of target guns. I possess neither of these qualifications. When a serious-eyed technician gets right down to cases with me about trajectory and velocity, I not only have no idea what he is talking about but I get violently sick at my stomach. And as far as knowing anything about taking a gun apart, this is as mystifying a process to me as the manufacture of a cyclatron or the theory of bent space. In illustration I will relate an incident which happened to me when I was 21 years old, and I can say that my knowledge of gunsmithing didn’t improve one iota from that day to this.

      I had just been appointed a Customs Patrol Inspector in San Diego, California, and had a triple-lock .44 caliber Smith & Wesson for a service gun. To say I was proud of this newly manufactured weapon was such an understatement as to be almost libelous.

      An older head in the organization took me to the San Diego Police vice squad offices one day to meet Detective Mike Shea who was not only a competent officer, but one of the greatest practical jokers in the city.

      Let’s see that pistol, kid, Mike said after the introduction, and I emptied the shells from the chamber and proudly handed it to him. Mike took a screw driver from his desk and deftly removed the handles. He scowled at the working mechanism for a minute and then took off the side plate. I watched him in wide-eyed wonder as he quietly took every two pieces apart which could be pried loose from one another. There was the most amazing assortment of springs, fulcrums and sizz-wheels I’d ever seen in one pile and when Mike got them all apart and stacked upon his desk, he got up and without another word briskly walked out of his office. I waited for him to come back for ten or fifteen minutes and finally asked the Lieutenant where he had gone. Home was his laconic reply. Deeply hurt, I bundled up the parts of my pistol and took them to a gunsmith in a paper sack. It cost me $2.00 to get it put back in snapping condition.

      I don’t know why it is that I can’t get interested in the arc made by a bullet in flight or in taking a gun apart, fixing whatever is wrong with it and putting it back together. These things seem as essentially a part of a pistol shooter’s agenda as wearing earplugs in a .45 match, but I have no more interest in them than I have in Cato the Elder, which is a way of saying that I have no interest in them at all.

      My stock in trade is the business of sticking a pistol out and whangety-banging with it at a target, and even this itself is subservient to the conviviality, sociability and friendly hell-raising that always seems to accompany such stuff.

      So this book will not deal with ballistics, trajectory, velocity or trigger actions. At the time I’m writing this preface I don’t know just what it will deal with, but I am certainly sure it won’t deal with any of those.

      DEAD AIM

      CHAPTER ONE — AN ODD CREATURE

      IT HAS BEEN SAID BY PEOPLE MUCH HANDIER WITH whimsy than I that a target pistol is an instrument of precision with a patridge sight on one end of it and a damn fool on the other. I might add to this description by

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