To me, the oddballs, crackpots, blowhards and know-it-alls are just a cherished part of the Gun Show entertainment experience.
A friend and I would go in for a table once in a while, and he would put his 1921 Thompson on the table as a display, to attract potential customers for the Stuff we were trying to unload. One of the steady attractees looked like the cartoonist R. Crumb; 98 lbs soaking wet and coke-bottle hornrims. But he always carried a year’s worth of
Soldier of Fortune magazines under his arm, and from the way he talked, he’d just come back from Katanga Province to spend his Krugerrands on R&R. Never had quite enough left to afford a Thompson for himself, but the next Mission would do it for sure.
This went on for a couple years, then he disappeared. There used to be tables where you could buy washers, screens and sockets. Then on the next table, you could buy tubes and end caps. If you bought from both tables and put it all together, it was an unregistered Silencer, which would attract the ATF. He’d reportedly done so; I prefer to believe he’s living in a Compound in the mountains in Cameroon, and the tribes he liberated (single-handedly, of course) worship him as a God.
Then there was ol’ Half-Moon Dave, who always had a lot of Cool Stuff on his table. If you looked at it too long without pulling out a wad of bills, (about 70 seconds, IIRC), he would give you the “Go ‘way, boy; ya bother me” routine. Didn’t stop me from buying a couple things from him that (unaccountably) were marked down into “my” price range.
“It’s
Business, Sonny; not
Personal,” as I recall my Consiglieri saying.
Some of those people I regard as Collector’s Items in a different venue than strictly guns&gun stuff. The guy who had a Ruger No. 3 in .30-40 Krag whose stock had been Bubbafied to where it actually looked worse than the factory stock; a noteworthy achievement. He had also, for unknown reasons, sawed the curlicue off the end of the lever.
I thought maybe this thoroughly ruined specimen might serve as the beginning of a decent project, if I could get it for what it was worth. When I asked the price, I was quoted a figure that was between the upper limit on a No. 3 and the lower limit on a No. 1.
I asked him why it was going for so much, and he told me it was a rare factory variant. “It’s a Ruger No. 2,” he said, solemnly, one “advanced collector” to another.
I thanked him and found myself grinning and smirking for the rest of the day. Definitely worth the price of admission.