Best Greetings to all our customers, family and friends.
This is our supposedly annual update of all our comings and goings, but this edition is not so "annual", as it must cover the several years of non-letters on our part. Actually, the reality is that most of the last 36 months I have had a tiger by the tail that has literally been wearing me out. I have been hanging on as valiantly as I can, while he has been swinging his tail back and forth trying to knock me loose, banging me through brambles and briars. Slowly but surely, I have been creeping up the tail; hand over hand, trying to reach his back before he knocks me loose. What that tiger doesn’t know is that I have a saddle in my back pocket and I’m just about to the point where I can throw that saddle on his back and ride that tiger.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, the tiger that we have been fighting is the airgun business that has become Pilkington Competition LLC, or Pilkguns.com for those on the net. The website… well that has become a thing unto itself. It started out as a small web based advertising effort, and has evolved into the world’s largest website devoted to Olympic shooting (and the variations thereof such as collegiate and junior programs). We also host a BBS TargetTalk that has become the focal point for dissemination of shooting information amongst the English speaking shooters around the world. Somewhat like the Energizer bunny, it keeps growing and growing and growing. For someone who swore he would never have a computer in his house just a few short years ago, it is amazing how much time we spend staring at that glittering cathode tube.
That tiger has taken his toll on all of us; the past couple of years have been hectic on all fronts. Rhonda, who is normally an excellent cook and makes mostly scratch-made meals, has fed the kids and me more frozen Pizzas and fast food in the last two years than in the entire previous 12 years of marriage. Rhonda is an essential part of the whole operation; she can do the accounting, talk "airgunese" on the phone, answer e-mail, and homeschool the kids, often all at the same time. Emily answers the phone and takes messages with utmost professionalism, then goes right back to creating a new "invention" or aggravating her brother.
Along the way we’ve had to enlist some help, from across the street to across the world. Buck Parson, one of the neighbor boys who has always helped me with odd jobs through the years, began working with me after school last year, and now is working here pretty much full time. He does wrapping and shipping and is getting pretty good at gunsmithing and some of manufacturing projects we are doing. But it is Warren Potter, our "Aussie son" who was our big stroke of luck, or Providence really (There is a verse in Corinthians about the Lord exceedingly and abundantly providing above all that you can think or ask, and this is certainly true in this case), who came to us all the way from Australia, although he is quick to point out that he was born a "Kiwi" and only left New Zealand under duress.
Warren, who is an accomplished shooter, with several gold medals on the International circuit, was working in his family’s store in Brisbane that catered to the Australian Olympic-style shooters, and wanted to emigrate from the socialist regime that Australia has become, for the relative freedom that the US still offers. Americans be warned; we are heading down that slippery slope.
Since he is actually one month older than me, we couldn’t legally adopt him but due to his shooting accomplishments, we were able to obtain a 01 visa for him as an athlete of extraordinary ability, and he became the perfect match to help me gain some headway on that tiger. Warren joined us in March of 2000 and is slowly learning to speak Southern, (just as we are absorbing some Aussie slang, you should hear Emily and Forrest say "G'day Mate!") and just a week ago got his first taste of that funny bit of precipitation called snow, not to mention cold weather in general. Warren is renting a small cabin next to our land, and has readily became part of our family, and Emily and Forrest insist that he must participate in "group hugs" when I’m leaving to go out of town.
Which I seem to do more than I like. The last 3 years have seen me in climes as varied as Kansas wheat fields, swimming in the Mediterranean Ocean outside Barcelona, riding the train through the Black Forest of Germany, having a sand fight with Emily in the Arizona dessert, wandering through catacombs in Vienna, getting soaked to the skin in a hot and muggy Atlanta thundershower or riding in the back of a bicycle-driven cab on a foggy cold night back to my hotel in London, half expecting to see Sherlock Holmes step out of the shadows with his deerstalkers cap on. Traveling is great fun, but like all things done to excess, gets old quick. Fortunately, I do get to take the kids along on some of these business trips, Emily has been on several major trips with me including a cross country drive to Phoenix and a couple of Customs clearings in Munich are stamped on her Passport. Rhonda was a little out of sorts that her 6 year-old daughter would see Europe before she did, but someone had to stay home and answer the phone and run the business!
Probably two of the greatest highlights of my travels have both been this past fall, the first at the Opening Ceremony of 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, marching out onto that big field as part of the US Olympic Team. What a rush! The feeling was somewhat akin to that I used to experience when running out onto the field for a football game, but far, far magnified as we came out of the tunnel and into the bright lights and the cheering crowds, representing America to the world. As the gunsmith for the Team and not an official competitor, I feel somewhat out of place out among the bright lights and cameras of the world and being in the presence of these fine athletes is an honor beyond words for me.
Less than 24 hours later, I was thrilled to watch the first Gold medal of the Games won by an American air rifle shooter Nancy Johnson.
For those of you that receive the NRA magazine American Rifleman, be sure and see the January 2001 issue, which started arriving in mailboxes about a few weeks ago, be sure and check out pages 40-43 for a nice spread on the Shooting events in Sydney, along with photos provided by yours truly. While I have often anticipated the time when my name would appear in this great publication of the shooting world, I always expected it would be for my engraving skills, not as a photo credit!).
The next one was in London, halfway around the world again, scarcely a month later on a far, far smaller scale but equally important for me, being given a tour of Holland & Holland (the shotgun world’s equivalent of a Rolls Royce, whom I do some engraving for from time to time). It was just amazing to me, that a little boy from Tennessee would given the royal treatment at one the worlds most expensive and best known gun makers.
Engraving is still a part of my life but after 17 years of it full-time, it has taken a back burner, with only a few small projects for old customers, and teaching the occasional class for GRS out in Kansas. But that is about to change, in couple of months I should have everything ready for the printers for a new book on engraving, to be published by the gunsmith tool supplier Brownells. We also are launching another website Learntoengrave.com which will be a learning station for beginning engravers, as well an outlet for some engravers tools and supplies that are not available elsewhere in the marketplace. And I do have some "killer" projects up my sleeves along the lines of the Tutankhamen project I did in ’97 that got so much acclaim.
Animals are still a big part of the home front, from our Pyrenees dogs, Jake and Kindermadchen to ducks, geese and lots of chickens, and lots of chickens that Emily is responsible for in her "egg business". She is responsible for their care and upkeep, to include the cost of their feed, derived from the sale of eggs gathered, and gets to keep the "profits" while dear old Dad is quietly underwriting the cost of overhead. Because of this, (or in spite of it) she is constantly dreaming up new business opportunities.
Emily and Forrest, in their desire to have a "real farm" began gathering money for the purchase of a horse, thus assuring us of that status. Somewhat in a desire to head this off or at least get it out of their system (foolish me); I took them over to a neighbor’s farm to pet some of their miniature horses. They just happened to have a young foal, that just happened to be really cute and pettable, that just happened to be one more than they needed to feed or wanted to try to sell, and they just happened to make us an offer that we couldn’t refuse (stupid me), that just happened to result in said young horse being loaded in a trailer and deposited at our house a few months later, that has just happened to take up far more of dear old Dad’s time than he ever expected. At this stage Rose is 2 years old, which is old enough to start training seriously (I didn’t know that horses were supposed to be 2 years old before your rode them; LOTS of things I’ve learned about horses in the last year). Rose appears to be a smart and wonderful horse, and is just beautiful to watch streaking around the field, (which had to be fenced to keep her out of the garden, which cost more than the horse did) and I look forward to the day when Emily can be racing around the field on her…but on the other hand this horse business has taken a considerable amount of time, far more than I ever considered, and I see no end in sight…So if anyone of you have any ideas on how to gracefully get out of this horse business, you will forever earn a place of honor in the Pilkington Hall of Fame. At least the adult members thereof.
Always quite the pair, Forrest and Emily turned 5 and 7 this year. It seems that when left to their own devices, they are either fighting against each other or jointly plotting some new way to confound their parents. Both children are learning German and we recently found an excellent tutor for them. What amazes me though is their thoroughly differences in temperament. Emily can be so stubborn, spankings, corner standings, threats or privilege removals and even carefully placed high explosives cannot dissuade her from her point of view for hours on end. I made the comment to my Dad one day that she sure was stubborn but that I supposed that she came by it honest, having gotten it from me. "No" he said, "She didn’t get it from you, you kept ALL of yours." Forrest on the other hand is such a gentle soul. A sharp word, can make his lips go pouty and then he drops his head down over into the nearest chair. It almost seems at time that a hard look his direction can wilt him, although he is getting more demanding as he gets older.
Probably our favorite Emily story was when she was about 4½, and Forrestman almost 3, I had told them several bedtime stories and they were demanding yet another one. Rhonda finally said "I’ve got one to tell" and told them one about a little girl and little boy who stayed up all night long asking for stories and because they didn’t go to bed, they were too tired they next day to go to the park and visit their Grandparents the next day or do anything fun. When Rhonda finally finished, she asked, "How did you like that story?" Emily indignantly replied, "That wasn’t a story. That was a commercial!"
Emily also is constantly inventing things, the most useful being her first. She had a problem reaching from her car seat to pull the door shut by her, and the additional problem of not being able to quite reach up to where the door handle was to open it. She quite handily solved this by her "invention" which consisted of two purple shoe laces, tied together to the pull handle on the door as well as the door handle, so that by grabbing the string she could pull the door shut and also pull the latch open when she wanted to get out. Forrest is not lacking in the smarts department, but shows his in different ways.
Recognizing that he needed a constant and easy supply of clean paper, he found a machine in the office that supplied his want, one piece at a time. When he wanted a new sheet of paper, he would walk over to the Xerox machine, push the little green button that he could barely see, walk over to the other end of the machine, and wait patiently while it whirred and flashed and then rolled out a nice warm freshly copied blank piece of paper. To beat it all he taught Emily this trick before we discovered what was going on.
Just a few weeks ago, Emily and Forrest decided to have a picnic in our newly concreted "springhouse" to celebrate the fact that the concrete was finally dry and it was cold and windy outside and it had a nice little door and a window to see out of. In the process of preparing for the picnic Forrest closed the door. It was not noticed that there was not a handle on the inside (there is now) until after the fact. After yelling at the top of their lungs for what seemed like a very long time to them (probably 10 minutes at most) Forrest decided to take action and stacked a couple of 5 gallon buckets together, and used a pair of scissors to break out the window. Forrest eased himself through the barely big enough opening in the broken shards of glass to get help for his sister. He came in the house ashen, with lip and voice quivering telling Rhonda that Emily was TRAPPED in the springhouse. While I was a little put off that he had broke out a window and that his "maturer" older sister had not had more patience, as likely they would have been "found" in another 15 or 20 minutes, I was impressed with his initiative to action, and so he was promptly decorated as a hero and given one of my Army medals off my dress uniform.
Maturity comes with age, whether your 6 or 36, just in different dosages or perhaps it’s a mellowing of the maturity you already have. What I mean by this is that the certain ideals that you have arrived at, your chosen personal beliefs or standards, do tend to get erased around the edges as times goes on. Partly I have seen it in my travels, partly in dealing with our customers, and partly with disciplining the kids. Sometimes it is a greater appreciation of culture or a tolerance of things beyond our understanding, or realizing that the communication of some things is not going to have the intended effect. The older I’ve gotten, the more I appreciate the fact that Communication is the glue that holds all things together and that there are vast subtleties of communication that go beyond a written text or spoken word. And statements that I would have made 5 or 10 years ago to live or die by just don’t seem as relevant by today’s perspective. Not owning a computer was one; I just did not want to be associated with that part of modern culture. Now I recognize that a computer is as an essential part of business communications as being able to run 70 on the Interstate (and Heavens knows I don’t drive that slow very often). Wearing a tie is another one of those things. For a great many years I was totally against it, believing I was a self made man, and the circles I traveled in did not require me to wear anything so foolish around my neck. And that of course was a statement I was making, by refusing to wear one in situations where it was expected of me. While I still have no fondness for that extra bit of men’s apparel, I now have recognized that in certain situations it is just as much a means of necessary communication as saying Hello! Different cultures from different countries of course have their own "rules" that the visitor must learn, or risk not fully understanding and thus enjoying fully the various situations you are presented with. And it's not just traveling abroad, we have so many subcultures, here in the States that each has their own set of rules and formalities, that are recognized as proper. Whether it's a business deal or a personal relationship, a willingness to learn and some flexibility go a long way.
I had an almost spiritual experience in Schloss Schönbrunn, a huge castle in Vienna, Austria that illustrates this point. The self guided-tour tape machine had just told me I was standing in the room (more square footage than my entire house, but a room) where Mozart gave his first concert. It was close to the end of a long, tiresome day for me, but all of a sudden being tired was forgotten as I stood in amazement and looked around the walls, as if expecting some centuries old echo to come bouncing back to my ear. I have been in Austria for a few days visiting Steyr-Mannlicher, and Gerd-Carlo, my sales representative, has taken me to Vienna to see the sights. Early that morning, we had gone to the Vienna Fleamarket, and I happily drug Gerd-Carlo up and down the aisles, searching for treasures and neat things to look at. I found a small 1930’s vintage, cast iron car that is the same scale as the Dinky/Tootsie-Toy cars that my Dad collects to go with his Lionel trains, a really neat pair of silver opera glasses and lots of other neat stuff. I was also looking for a nice doll representative of Austria, to take back for Emily, but saw none even close to what I wanted. We spent about 4 hours at the flea market, including going up through the food section, where there were all sorts of sausages and cheeses to tempt your culinary desires. We obviously had been on our feet all this time, and now I was ready to go out and drive to an antique store, or maybe a good toy store, and then get off my feet, maybe see the country side a little, but no, Gerd Carlo wanted to take me into the center of the city to see some things, so off we go "fusgangen" (walking).
A couple of visits to toy stores still do not uncover the kind of high-end, special kind of doll, that I wanted to get for Emily. Well, we were kind of looking for a Sissi doll. Sissi was a popular queen of Austria who was assassinated in 1908, Well Gerd said we had to go see this real old church."No Gerd, I've seen about all the old buildings I want to see". Actually I have been on my feet since about 6:30 this morning (its about 1 PM now) and my feet are sore and my bad leg is starting to voice its displeasure. "No Scotty, you must see this church", so we walk some more. So we get to the outside of the church, and he shows me some of the worn away stonework on the outside and tells me their respective ages, and I’m like "Ok Gerd, lets go."
"No Scotty, we must go inside and look." Okay, being the agreeable guest I go inside, take a look around, and say "OK Gerd, lets go."
"No, Scotty, we must take a tour".
So we go over to where the tour starts. The tour, which is guided, begins every hour, on the hour, is some thirty minutes away. So I say, "OK Gerd, we don’t really have time to wait, let’s go somewhere else" (read between the lines Gerd, I am tired of standing on my feet and this is B-O-R-I-NG). " No Scotty, we wait for the tour to begin."
So we wait, and then begin the tour, which goes down into the catacombs, and here all these bones from the Black Plague, from back in the Middle Ages, stacked like cordwood, and it was just fascinating beyond belief and despite my weary legs, I am really, really glad that he brought me.
So finally its off to the car, and then off to visit this huge castle, which I’m still not really in the humor for much more walking, but there is hope that this castle, which was the former residence of Sissi, might have a doll that I can purchase for Emily. So off to Schloss Schönbrunn. Well, Gerd Carlo takes me in the back entrance, full of gardens and neat architecture, but it’s still a very long walk, and finally we arrive at the castle. It is after 4 in the afternoon. My hopes of visiting the gift shop and leaving are dashed when Gerd Carlo tells me we must also take a tour here. At least these are self-paced, and there is an option of taking one that is 15 minutes long, as opposed to the longer one that is over 45 minutes long. So I say "Look Gerd here is a short one we can take and then visit the gift shop". "No Scotty; we must take the long tour and then it ends up in the gift shop."
"Okay Gerd." So we go on the long tour. And I see paintings done by the masters, visit a room that was a favorite of Marie Antoinette when she was a girl, the room where Kennedy met Khrushchev in ‘61, and then, in the room of Mozart’s first concert… Imagine… It was just amazing, standing there, head cocked, ears perked, more than halfway expecting to hear some ancient vibration echoing across the tapestries. What a treat. I really hated to leave that room.
And then finally, almost no-sequentially, at this point, the gift shop. Yes, they have lots of Sissi memorabilia, books posters, pins, and even a Sissi doll... sort of. A "Sissi" Barbie doll, made in Malaysia, nothing at all like what I wanted, more so just that it was a Barbie doll, something I always said that my daughter would never own, but what’s a dad to do, It’s late in the day, I’m leaving early in the next morning, and we have already looked fruitlessly over half of Vienna. So I pick up the doll walked to the cash register, and spend some of my hard earned Shillings on Malaysia plastic junk and it looks very nice on the shelf in her bedroom. Thank you very much. Of course I did buy her some authentic Sissi items, some poster and books to help her with her German instruction. But the point I’m making is, had I been resolute in my American ideas, or at least my personal perceptions, I would have never had the experiences that now stand out as the high points of the entire trip for me.
Speaking of highpoints, here a some of extra ones that stand out in my memores of the last few years.
1999*Forrestman, at a news conference with Barbara Mandrell and USA Shooting, where Barbara is made an official member of the US Shooting Team. When they put the team jacket on her back,( which is exactly like one I’d worn for the previous couple of years) Forrest, back in the audience, pipes up loudly "That’s my DADDY’s jacket"
1998*Sitting on a bus in Barcelona Spain, heading out to the shooting range during the 98 World Championships, and finding out that the older gentleman sitting beside me had been a lieutenant under Rommel during the Africa campaign. He had been captured there, and spent the rest of the war as a POW in America. Because he spoke fluent English and therefore was considered a high risk for escape, he was constantly transferred from camp to camp, traveling 56,000 miles by train between 1942 and 1946. Worked in Washington salmon canning factories, tobacco farms in TN, ranches in Texas, and numerous other locations during his "imprisonment" that he had fond memories of.
1998*Forrest man stopping at the landing on our stairs and announcing loudly, "FORRESTMAN PILKINGTON IS COMING DOWN THE STAIRS" as if he were being announced at some grand ballroom.
1999*Watching Chitty Chitty, Bang Bang with my kids was almost deja vu, having flashbacks to when I first saw it as a thirty years ago…. with my parents back when I was a kid. It was almost as if there was a window in time there, that I could just step through, like Alice’s looking glass.
2000*Returning from a late evening at the Sydney Opera House, walking the darkened streets of the Olympic village when suddenly Nancy Johnson, steps out of the darkness and says "Hey, I know you". Less than 12 hours earlier she had stepped into the World’s fame by winning the first medal of the Olympic Games, so I replied, "Hey, I know you too and now the whole world knows you." She said, "I forgot to Thank you for getting me up to my Dad". After the medal ceremony, she wanted to get up to the grandstand where her father was, but she didn’t know how to get around all the barriers, and I had led her running around the circuitous route up to her Dad for joyous reunion. I said "You make the touchdowns, I’ll run interference for you anytime."
Well, enough of my ponderings. Slowly but surely, we are making progress with our lives. Even as I write this we have frames sitting outside that will soon have concrete poured in them that will be the location of our new office and inventory area, along with a small showroom for our infrequent, becoming more common, drop in airgun visitors. Come see us!
I hope this New Year will find each of you blessed , joyous and prosperous, or at least slowly getting your tigers under control.
Scott, Rhonda and the kids.
