1935 - Cars and guns for fun

[LokRobster]

I was thinking this weekend about my grandfather's journal, crazy stuff they did for fun prior to WW2 - sitting on the front fenders of a Model A Ford, driving around the farm's fields at night and shooting rabbits.

Figured I'd share his account here, dealing as it does with guns and cars. No armor, though, nor other vehicles shooting at them... but hey you can't have it all, right?

From when he was 13 years old in Poteet, TX, Spring of 1935:

"Among the things we did together was hunt jackrabbits at night with automobiles. A boy with a rifle sat on each front fender. The headlights, then mounted separately on the fenders, made a good anchor for clamping the legs around. The driver then cruises over the fields and open meadows, picks up one or more rabbits in the headlights, and tries to keep them there by a zigzag chase, while the riflemen try to bring them down. This is a real thrill and challenge to both the riflemen and driver. Even the passengers enjoy it. On one occasion Jim and I accompanied our cousins, Duane and Gene Schaezler, on a short run of thirty minutes in Duane’s Model A “Daisy June” and bagged fifty rabbits. Rabbits were so numerous that year that they destroyed a lot of our corn crop, and we were killing all we could. Most years their crop damage was negligible, and we killed them mainly for food."

I inherited his Winchester 1903 .22 semi-auto rifle and plan to pass it on to my daughter - she loves shooting it, too bad ammo is so impossible to find for it these days! [.22 WIN-Auto, not .22 LR :( ]

In WW2, Grandpa von Bose was an aircraft mechanic and a 0.50 cal gunner on B-24s out of Morotai in the South Pacific. After the war he worked as an Engineer for Hughes Aviation [Howard Hughes in California], helped with the space program in 60s, then in the Oil Industry and later in aircraft conversion [adapting new systems into old airframes].

He was the stereo-typical Absentminded Professor, always looking for a better way to do things and designing/inventing ways to make things better. He has over 50 patents - I definitely consider him my main role model, even if I never sat on the fender of a car at night shooting stuff...