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Clark Gable's Model 12

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Drew Hause

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#4 ·
That story about how Roy Rogers aquired Clark Gables Model 12 is exactly what Roy told me.

Years ago, at the Apple Valley gun club I met Roy Rogers for the first time. He came driving up in a Chevy van and wearing a baseball cap, he was a very friendly man.

We were shooting pot shoots that day and he was waiting for his son Dusty to show up so they could shoot the buddy shoots together.

While we were talking he told me about the day Gable was pissed off about his shooting, and blamed the gun. He bought the gun and shot it the remainder of his trap shooting days.

Anyway he showed me the gun and let me hold it. On the bottom of the stock it still had a name plate with Clark Gables name on it. He asked me if I wanted to shoot it, and of course I did take a few shots. I then returned the favor, by letting him handle and shoot my Perazzi. He didn't like my release trigger as it was to foreign to him.

I've met him a few more times after that. Once he pulled into the gun club riding a Harley !! A great guy !!

Tom
 
#5 ·
Tom Strunk said:
That story about how Roy Rogers aquired Clark Gables Model 12 is exactly what Roy told me.

Years ago, at the Apple Valley gun club I met Roy Rogers for the first time. He came driving up in a Chevy van and wearing a baseball cap, he was a very friendly man.

We were shooting pot shoots that day and he was waiting for his son Dusty to show up so they could shoot the buddy shoots together.

While we were talking he told me about the day Gable was pissed off about his shooting, and blamed the gun. He bought the gun and shot it the remainder of his trap shooting days.

Anyway he showed me the gun and let me hold it. On the bottom of the stock it still had a name plate with Clark Gables name on it. He asked me if I wanted to shoot it, and of course I did take a few shots. I then returned the favor, by letting him handle and shoot my Perazzi. He didn't like my release trigger as it was to foreign to him.

I've met him a few more times after that. Once he pulled into the gun club riding a Harley !! A great guy !!

Tom
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Cool story. Thanks!
George
 
Discussion starter · #7 ·
A very dapper Lit in his younger days?

Image


"The Call of the Wild", 1935
 
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#10 ·
Clark Gable served as a "Gunnery Officer" in a Bomber Wing in WWII and flew some combat missions. The story goes the Brass in AAF , although Gunnery Officers were required to fly a certain number of missions with the gunners they were in charge of, didn't want Gable to fly for fear he would be shot down, captured ,and used for enemy propaganda . Gable stormed into the CO's office and demanded he be allow to fly those missions with his men so they let him. BTW, he was in the same officers cadet class as Bob Allen, who was also a Gunnery Officer" . Bob Allen wrote about it in his book "Shooter".
 
#11 ·
I don't think we have many celebrities like that generation produced any more. I'm sure there might be more than the one or two I can think of. I think Tom Selleck served. A lot of guys served back in the WWII days.
 
#12 ·
Selleck was never "active", he was in the national guard in a unit that celebrities were allowed in that was guaranteed never to get activated. However his unit was called up to patrol south central L.A. during the Watts riots. When I got drafted in 71 half my basic training company was national guard and the D.I.'s HATED them, they heaped all the abuse and insults they could on those guys(which was good for the rest of us) because they considered them rich boy draft dodgers. I went to college with 2 ex-seals and when Magnum P.I. came out and they had Selleck portraying an ex-seal it drove those guys out of their minds.
 
#13 ·
dcal said:
Selleck was never "active", he was in the national guard in a unit that celebrities were allowed in that was guaranteed never to get activated. However his unit was called up to patrol south central L.A. during the Watts riots. When I got drafted in 71 half my basic training company was national guard and the D.I.'s HATED them, they heaped all the abuse and insults they could on those guys(which was good for the rest of us) because they considered them rich boy draft dodgers. I went to college with 2 ex-seals and when Magnum P.I. came out and they had Selleck portraying an ex-seal it drove those guys out of their minds.
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I think the 29th Infantry Division was MD-DE-VA National Guard, and they landed on Omaha Beach. Being in the Guard is not a safe spot all the time, just most of the time.
 
#15 ·
My dad was from Conneaut Lake, PA and claimed he'd run into Clark Gable there. His story said that Gable, as a kid, lived with his grandmother at the bottom of what, I think even to this day, is called Gable Hill which is a really steep and long hill going into Conneaut Lake from Meadville.

Dad also set pins at Conneaut Lake park, as a young guy when it was booming, and claimed to have known Perry Como there - before he became famous.

Us 3 boys had no reason to doubt dad but I've always wondered how true these stories were. Dad loved trap shooting and, typically, wasn't a yarn teller.
 
#16 ·
DCmodel12, your dad probably did, as a little kid my family worked a farm near Gable's home town Cadiz, Ohio and it was common knowledge that Gable as a kid spent some time with his grandparents who were Pennsylvania Dutch on their farm in Pennsylvania. As for Gables model 12 I saw it years ago on display at the Roy Roger's Museum and it was no safe queen, old Roy got his use out of that gun. Roy and Gable were actually quite friendly as they were both from Ohio and had similar interests. Roy had a trap and skeet range on his Chatsworth, Ca. property and Gable used to shoot there quite often as it was close to his home and there were no gawkers hanging around. One of the old timers I met in the 80's once told me Gable was partial to side by side and Remington shotguns.
 
#17 ·
In 1970 I was transferred from New Jersey to Los Angeles and lived in Camarillo about 60 miles North of LAX. Driving across the farm fields very early one morning I spied a gentleman with hip boots and a shotgun walking some drainage ditches. When I asked about gaining access to the property he mentioned that it was a private club owned by his Dad and Clark Gable! A year later found me in a private club North of Seattle that cost a wopping $130 per season and included boats and decoy storage. That club is now gone too.
 
#18 ·
My Drill Instructors during the VietNam years didn't know the difference between a US, an RA, an NG, an AR, or any other supposed draft dodger. They beat the hell out of all of us. Of course, we were at Fort Bragg, so no one got off easy. The US were more proud than the rest, because we didn't ask for any special treatment regarding training or posting. We threw ourselves to the winds, whatever they may have been. The strange thing was that the AR and the NG, as well as the RA, got sent to VietNam at about the same rate as us draftee US guys. I had a monumental 153 OCT score, and I was in great shape, so OCS was on my horizon. However, I excused myself from the third year required for OCS and volunteered for whatever they had to offer to an enlisted man for two years. Somehow, I survived.
 
#19 ·
When I was drafted in 71 I was sent to Ft. Campbell Ky. there was a definite pecking order RA's got treated best followed by US's, the reservists got a little grief but like I said in my previous post the NG's got the undying disrespect of the DI's. A lot of it had to do with the fact that the NG's had a real superior attitude as most of them came from well to do connected families and were in college and they thought the rest of us were just a bunch of losers. Whenever they could the DI's would pit the RAs & US's against the NG's and we almost always won because we couldn't stand those guys. All of our RA's went to Viet Nam as they requested it. They weren't a pretty bunch but they weren't afraid of a fight. As many of you know when get to basic training the command gives you a series of written tests to see how smart you are, if you pass one test they give another and another until you finally fail a test then they send you back to your company. Out of our company myself and 3 other guys took all the tests, on the final test me and one other guy passed, one of the guys who failed was an NG with 2 years of college. What we didn't know until after we took it wasthat the last test was the West Point Entrance Exam. When the NG who failed it found out he was beaten out by an Ohio farm boy with a high school diploma he became unglued. He DEMANDED that the instructor rescore our tests, of course he got thrown out and sent back to the company. He wound up making such a big jack ass out of himself the other NG's cut him loose. The other guy who passed took the Army up on the offer to go to "The Point", I turned it down, they got me for 2 years and that was all they were getting, plus I figured if I was smart enough to go to West Point I was smart enough to go to college when I got out which is what happened.
 
#20 ·
There was never a "West Point entrance test" in a Basic Training company. There is only a battery of aptitude tests. You didn't turn down West Point or even guarantee OCS placement. However, you did turn down the third year of active duty, which was the right thing to do. The test you took included the OCT score, (Officer Candidate Test score). The OCT is the average of the Math and the Verbal subtests, maximum score 160 on the average, maximum score in each of the two tests. Scores in the other tests mean nothing. If you had accepted the "West Point Appointment", all you would have been guaranteed would have been the third year. You made the right decision because the common result of accepting what you thought was a West Point appointment was, and still is, another year in a combat zone.
 
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