February 24, 2017 (Friday)
In the movie, “A Christmas Story,” nine-year-old Ralphie Parker wants only one thing for Christmas: a Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-shot Range Model air rifle with a compass in the stock and “this thing which tells time” (a sundial). I got one much like that for Christmas in 1941.
Yesterday I wrote about the movie projector that I got for Christmas in 1940. Well, the very next Christmas in 1941 I received another gift that I had wanted for a long time, a nice BB gun.
In the movie, everybody kept telling Ralphie he would “shoot his eye out” if he got the BB gun he wanted so badly. Sadly, he almost did that, but instead broke his glasses. I did not shoot out my eye, but I did shoot the kitchen window of a neighbor lady two doors away. She was so nice when she pointed out what I had done, and she never told my family about it. She just cautioned me to be more careful in the future.
That would be the last Christmas for a while with steel BBs. During WW2, BB guns and BBs were out of production, and after the war steel was still in short supply for those purposes, and aluminum BBs were used, then lead ones, and finally toward the close of the 1940s, back to good guns and steel BBs. By that time, I was interested in other things.
