On Monday, I had a preview of what it’s going to feel like the first time we give our little Nina the keys to a car.
I handed her a loaded gun.
In terms of teenage safety, a gun is a much better bet than a car. According to the most recent statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, you’re about 150 times more likely to die in a car crash in Pennsylvania than in a shooting accident.
Nevertheless.
There’s a leap of faith involved in teaching a young person how to handle a firearm. In a single momentary lapse of judgment, a rifle — in this case, a varminting piece, chambered in .17 HMR — can inflict a mortal wound.
On the other hand, so can a Subaru.
I learned how to shoot when I was about Nina’s age. Discharging a firearm wasn’t really practical within the city limits of the Nation’s Capital, so my rifle training happened at summer camp, on a sun-baked range, surrounded by the clatter of .22s and the excited barking of the counselors, who must have wondered what they’d done in a past life to deserve the job of riding herd over a full platoon of armed and squirming 13-year-olds.
Guns weren’t part of our home life. As my marksmanship slowly improved, and I earned patches and pot-metal badges, I daydreamed about the bus ride back to Washington, where I’d show off my best targets, the ones with five holes tightly clustered in the bulls-eye. I’d be a family pioneer, the first Olshan capable of bagging a deer — or, better yet, something truly exotic, maybe an ibex or a gnu.
Imagine my disappointment to discover a set of framed medals, dating from the 1930s, that my grandmother had won as a shooter.
My grandmother!
Those old medals puzzled me. What was she doing learning to shoot? I thought that girls back then were taught domestic arts and fancy skills, the better to attract a mate.
I now know that part of the answer lies in America’s first female celebrity, who also happened to be one of the first international superstars of either sex: a demure, wasp-waisted looker who could shoot a playing card in half – on edge – at 90 feet.
I’m referring, of course, to Annie Oakley.
There’s a Pennsylvania connection to Ms. Oakley, or, as she was born, Phoebe Ann Moses. Her parents were Pennsylvania Quakers from Hollidaysburg, Blair County, about 100 miles due west from the porch where our little Nina took her first tentative shot.
The Moseses lost their family business, a tavern, to a fire, so they started over as farmers across the Ohio border in Darke County.
Annie was one of nine siblings. Unfortunately, that was too many mouths for the family to feed, so when she was nine, Annie was turned over to the Darke County Infirmary, which functioned as a poorhouse. She was “bound out” as a nanny to a local family, which promised room and board and a tiny weekly wage.
Thus began the two worst years of Annie’s life. She was essentially a slave: unpaid, forced to work from morning to night, locked in closets, abused – even thrown out barefoot in the snow as punishment for dozing off over some darning.
She never publicly named the family, but for the rest of her life, she referred to them as “the wolves.”
She ran away from the wolves, only to find, when she got home, that her family’s financial situation hadn’t improved. There wasn’t enough money for regular schooling, so Annie took up trapping, and then hunting, as a way of earning her keep.
Desperation, coupled with a genius for handling long guns, led to success. By the time she was fifteen, Annie had earned enough from her business supplying game to local hotels and markets to pay off the mortgage on the family farm. Her reputation as a crack shot led to a shooting contest in Cincinnati with a handsome young traveling showman named Frank Butler. Annie beat Mr. Butler, who promptly fell in love with her, married her, and took her on the road.
Annie’s exploits with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show are legendary. I can recommend an excellent PBS documentary, the American Experience’s Annie Oakley, which you can watch on demand at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/Oakley.
Her brilliant marksmanship took her to Europe, where she dazzled millions, became the toast of high society, and rubbed shoulders with royalty. The Wild West show traveled with royalty of a different sort, among them Chief Sitting Bull, who adored Annie, and ceremonially adopted her as his daughter. He called her “Watanya Cicilla,” which in Sioux means something along the lines of “Little Sure-shot.”
Annie Oakley’s entertainment career is legend. Less well known is her life-long commitment to teaching women how to shoot. Shooting skills had lifted her out of poverty; fed her family; made her a star on every continent. A woman who could shoot would never go hungry. She could protect herself against predatory men, against wolves of all kinds.
She wasn’t a suffragette, although the movement tried mightily to enlist her. Annie cultivated a buttoned-down, Victorian image of womanhood. The contrast between her tightly corseted waist and her lethal prowess with a gun was what made her career.
But she believed deeply in the idea of striving towards excellence. Daily practice; athleticism; a sterling reputation; courage. These were her watchwords.
I hope to pass all of this down to Nina. All of it, plus one more watchword.
Safety.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 01 March 2012
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
