Jimmy was born on July 5, 1897. Until he was five or six, he believed all the parades and excitement on July 4 th were in celebration of his birthday. He was a little disappointed; when in the first grade, he learned they were not.

He was an intelligent child, with an abiding curiosity, particularly in the sciences and mechanics. Because he was a late child of a second marriage, his father indulged him greatly. When he was eight, he purchased a starting pistol from a catalog company he found on the back of a magazine. In those days, one could buy practically anything from catalogs, provided one had the wherewithal, and Jimmy came from a relatively well-off family.

While it was great fun, being able to produce a loud bang, eventually the novelty wore off, an Jimmy decided he wanted a real gun; one that would actually shoot things. Being moderately mechanical, he did what any healthy, unattended eight-year old would do. He took the pistol out to the barn, and clamped it in the blacksmith vise. Armed with his father’s sharpest drill bit and hand-crank drill, he proceeded to drill the barrel out to the chamber.

What happened next might not be obvious to the less mechanically inclined, so a bit of explanation is in order. The pistol was a revolver. That is to say, it had a cylinder rotating on a central axle and drilled around its circumference with holes, called “chambers” that held the ammunition. Drawing the hammer back rotated the cylinder, to bring a fresh round under the hammer. Pulling the trigger allowed the hammer to fall, thus setting off the round.

Jimmy reasoned correctly that as the cylinder was lined up when he drilled out the barrel, each partial rotation of the cylinder would bring the next chamber into alignment. What he didn’t realize was, because it was a blank pistol, intended only to set off a mild charge of powder, the cylinder had no locking mechanism to hold a chamber in alignment with the barrel. That is absolutely necessary under the much higher pressures involved in pushing a projectile through the barrel and out the muzzle.

Consequently, when on the morning of July 4, he placed a live round (which he had stolen from his father’s supply) in the chamber, and fired the piece to celebrate, the bullet did not line up perfectly with the barrel. The pressures were extremely high, and shavings of brass and lead went everywhere, mostly out of the crack between the cylinder and the barrel. Unfortunately, that crack was situated right behind the middle knuckle of Jimmy’s finger, on the trigger.

With his forefinger dangling by a piece of skin, Jimmy went into the house and asked his mother, “Can you fix this?” whereupon his mother fainted dead away.

He went across the street to Annie Emerson’s house, and got her father to finish the amputation, stitch the flap of skin across the stump, and bandage it.

******************************

At about the age of four or five, I asked my grandfather why he was missing a finger. “I was playing with explosives, the morning of July 4 th . My mother fainted when I asked her to fix it, and I had to go across the street to Annie Emerson’s house. I was disgusted,” was all he ever told me.

Consequently, I grew up with a healthy respect for fireworks. Explosive fireworks were (and still are) illegal in Maryland, but we used to manage to get them, anyway. My friends used to hold them in hand to light them, but I never did.

After he died, while cleaning the firearms out of my grandmother’s basement, I found a starting pistol, with half a brass casing stuck in one chamber. The front of the cylinder was jammed against the barrel and wedged there by a piece of brass and lead, melted together. Looking at the muzzle, I could see the barrel had been drilled by hand, slightly off center. Putting two and two together, I was pretty sure I’d found what took off my grandfather’s finger. I removed the grips and extracted the mainspring, thus rendering it incapable of ever again being fired.

Several years later, while going through some old papers, I found a receipt for fifty cents from Peerless Firearms dated 1905, for purchase of a twenty two caliber starting pistol. The mailing addressee on the receipt was my grandfather.

So then I knew, as a well-known radio personality used to say, “…the rest of the story.”