Ah Model 12s--nothing like 'em and unlikely ever to be. Worked all summer between my juniorand senior years of high school to afford a used Model 12 in sixteen gauge for $66. Couple years lalter I figured out the IC boring wasn't good for pass shooting ducks so I had a Poly installled for $25. These were huge expenditures the year the first Kennedy was running for President and just before his body was lugged home from Dallas. PolyChokes in those days were not subject to the curled lip of latter day purists--I only knew one person who could afford a whole separate front-end for his Model 42 and thought he must be rich!
Never checked the year it was born; still sleeps in my gun cabinet, ready to go on call. I went to buy a Model 12 in twelve gauge in 1964--everybody who knows the least bitabout meknows this tale--and the cupboard was bare as today's cupboards are bare of .22 rimfire ammo. First I heard of Model 12s being discontinued was when I walked into the Sears Roebuck sporting good section the week before 1964 duck season. Some kind of jungle tom toms that preceded the internet and the myriad gun magazines of today had swept the market clean.
I was as unsettled then as I was last night when I read that the government is contemplating the destruction of the copper-wired telephone system that served this nation efficiently for a century, in favor of deregulated wireless competition. Nobody up there seems to know anything about EMPs or speculators like those that drove oil prices through the roof and more recently almost destroyed the world economy. But that's off the nostalgic point of Model 12s.
I have a more recently acquired 20 that was born the year of the most famous Stock Market Crash, 1929. Amazing that companies like Winchester were just keeping on keeping on in the face of that. I suppose speculators had failed to control the entire manufacturing capability of the U.S. that time around, unlike the"greed is good" era that came later. Can't afford 2 3/4-inch bismuth very often so haven't shot it much.
Which leaves my Heavy Duck, acquired for a mere $300 the year Social Security finally admitted I was disabled and I received my back pay, having sold so much in the meantime to make ends meet. The miracle of finding a perfectly functioning and not beat-up Heavy Duck for that price in 2008 was explained by disinclination to burn three-inch steel in the fine old gun. I said you know what? That gun will outlast me by who knows how many generations, and I'm so crippled up I won't run that much steel through, and besides, there's never been a semblance of a scratch in the bores of my Belgian Brownings.
The Chinese and Italians are making replicas of nostalgic arms from Colt Woodsmen to '87 and '97 Winchesters to a veritable blizzard of sixguns and lever guns; now the Brazilians are making a Marlin 336 clone. I guess the American way of life still is honored by those who aspire to it from afar, at least as personified by recreation of the guns of America's supermacy in the world--when Americans didn't give a hoot in hell about international supremacy except as it provided markets for their free enterprise, left them at peace to hunt and fish without worrying about family members in harms'way, and offered a decent chance to make a living betwen hunting seasons. Maybe someday a Chinese or Italian or Brazilian (or even Japanese) craftsman will happen across that ancient magazine advertisement of a grey-haired man in hip boots and canvas coat, sitting on top of a mountain of expended red paper shotshells and holding a Model 12. The non-Mad Men caption simply read: "for a lifetime of shooting."
Understatement--Model 12s were and are good for more than one lifetime of shooting. Maybe one of these craftsmen will be inspired to reverse-engineer the Model 12 with computer-assisted design, and have an epiphany about how to adapt modern methods to creation of old-time quality at a price point ordinary people can afford--unlike those outrageously expensive Italian lever-gun clones.
Ah well--it's pretty to think so.
