The way it was

Mine was a Crosman 760 Pumpmaster, and I would lay on a horse blanket on the retaining dike behind our farmstead and shoot the grape-bunch-like heads from wild Blue Hyacinth which grew in the edges of our pasture. I typically would limit myself to one magazine full of BB’s per day, which I had never counted or looked up until just now - 200 BB’s. For many years, as the eldest great grandchild by almost a decade, I used to take my younger cousins out around our grandparents farm every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter after squirrels, rabbits, and pigeons. The gas rings are dried, so it needs a fresh couple drops of oil to build pressure at all, but my son started shooting it when he was 2 years old. Seems they used to cost about $40 when I was a kid, so we can be sure we’ve gotten our money’s worth out of the little rifle over the last 30+ years.

The only "gun" my folks would let my brother and me go shoot unsupervised as kids was a common Red Ryder bought from a local Gibson's or Winn's (can't remember which store).

Of course we had to share it. No such thing as one gun per person until you bought it yourself.

Grandma bought me a Daisy, but mom wouldn't let me have it at home and I just got to shoot it when visiting Nebraska. My first around-the-yard rifle was a Sheridan .20 pump-up pneumatic that I got pretty good with out to about 10 yards -- further than that was outside the yard.

I still have my “first one”. As a matter of fact I was just looking at a picture of me at 7 years old shooting it.

I actually tried shooting her the other day and while she feeds and fires fine she just dribbles the rounds out with no power. Bounces off paper at point blank range, but I still have her.

My first experience with "guns" was a break action Marksman.
When we moved to our shrimp farm in 96 i got a string of pump bb guns that ate thousands of rounds a month shooting toads by the hundreds a week (dug holes in the ponds), and piles of doves that we ate. Shot alot of targets too.

Crossman 760. Charged with keeping the marauders (robins, bluejays and chipmunks) of my grandmother's berry patch at bay at 8 yrs or so. Lots of other stuff to shoot while patrolling, and an unlimited supply of BB's (Gramp understood). Made my first wingshot on a bluejay crossing at about 20 yds with his beak full of Raspberries. Gram happened to be watching. I was the oldest grandchild, but that sealed the deal as her favorite.

I had the Crossman 760 as well, 10 pumps and a .177 pellet would quite certainly cool a cottontail.
We used several of them for our 4H shooting sports club 40 years later with great success.

My dad hated bb guns always said they can be as dangerous as a 22, think it was sincee his cousin would shot him with a red rider when they visited dad would beat up the cousin then dad would get the belt when grandpa got home lol.
I did have a few to shoot in the yard since we were in town, had a few original red riders, a daisy pump, model 25? Can't remember. I like the 2 760s the best tho, one had sights and the other dad found a nice old 3/4" weaver we put on it.

my favorite target was shooting dandelion tops off and we lived by a small creek. Later in high school I was in jrotc and shot in the air rifle team. Did pretty good and moved up to a walther after a few weeks but started on the daisy 753, I made expert with it and shot a few practice matches with a 300 scope. It was a cheap gun but boy did those shoot.

2 years ago after all the years I got a daisy 853 from cmp, they have the original 753 stocks tho. Fun when I can shoot it but can't were I live now.

My first one was a Daisy, forget the model. Plastic stock circa 1980 and it held the big 600+ BBs! The sights weren't really that effective, maybe minute of beer can, but I learned to be a hell of a fast instinct shooter with it picking pigeons and sparrows out of Grandpa's barn as well as pretty much any other bird not on Grandma's protected list. Empty shotshells were a favorite target. Took me 3 years to wear it out. The mechanism still worked, but the stock developed a stress crack at the wrist and eventually broke right off, probably from firing it "Rifleman style" from the hip. On that model, you could open the lever, depress the trigger, and let go the lever and it fired at nearly full power. Definitely not lawyer approved. I averaged a 5000BB "Treasure Chest" when they were still brass plated "gold" every month for 3 years.

Never really learned about precision marksmanship until I was upgraded to a Daisy 880 pellet/BB rifle at the ripe old age of 8 due to a striped gopher infestation in Grandpa's nice yard. You only got one chance at them until they were too educated to get into airgun range. Grandpa bought me the rifle on the sly, and it took Mom and Dad a year to figure out I had it. I don't know what their secret was, but it was nearly as accurate with a BB rattling down the bore as with pellets. BBs were cheaper by far, so that's mostly what I shot.

My 1st bb gun was a daisy pump. Second one was a Crossmen 760. Lots of fun back then. And today air guns are still a lot of fun.

I have a .22 bullet trap in my man cave. I like to shoot at targets with my Red Ryder. Good fun on rainy and on cold days.

I don't recall what happened to the original I got for Christmas at about age 10. I probably wore it out. But about 30 years ago I found another just like the one I had as a kid and snapped it up.

It's a Daisy with the same dimensions and shape as a Winchester 94. Although it is a bit lighter.

The kid across the street and I used to combine all of our toy soldiers, tanks, Jeeps, etc., and lay out a battlefield in his back yard. We would take mud and pack it around firecrackers with the fuse exposed. After the mud dried they became our hand grenades. We would then use our BB guns and homemade hand grenades to knock over the toy soldiers. Then set them up and do it over again.

Farm raised, my foster brother and I never went out to bring the cows in with out our RedRyders. Like others Bumble Bees and flower heads were targets.
I still have a RedRyder Daisy, several pumps and a couple of CO2 pistols.

Around 1975 when I got my Daisy 102. Back when they still put wood on them. Thousands of bbs through that gun. Horrible trigger. But so much fun.

Never had my own but a friend had his dad's Daisy Model 25...that was built for lead BB's. He used it back in the 20's that way. Daisy gladly sent us a steel BB tube for it and we shot literally thousands of them. He was a lawyers son, probably the richest kid in town but a great guy and so was his day. Their attic was the shooting gallery for our entire Cub Scout Den. We used paper shotgun shells from the town's trap and skeet club for targets and all of us qualified Expert when drafted in 64-65.

Off to college for me and I traded him for it...then used it with both of my sons growing up. The shooting skills I learned with that old Daisy put me on the Air Force Academy rifle team for four years. Much later my #1 son rebuilt the innards with WD-40 and a few spring and piston parts. The gun shoots every bit as well now as it did in 1956.

Best regards, Rod

taliv said:

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But really, it was bumble bees. Tens of thousands of BBs every few months at wasps and bumble bees. And when there weren’t any flying insects, dandelions.

I never even had my own BB gun. From pretty much 5th grade til I left for college I used the daisy that my dad had when he was a kid in the 50s. I can’t imagine how many rounds that thing saw.

single cock spring loaded. The high velocity and multi pump air ones hit too hard for me to shoot wasps on the house

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Wow!

Mine was given to me by an uncle in Kentucky. Probably belonged to one of my cousins.

It was rusted up inside, but I found a can of oil and spend a lot of time dribbling oil in to lube the spring and working the lever action.

Then, a couple days later at another uncle's house, Uncle Elroy told one of my cousins to take me into town "and get him some BB-shot".

After that, I went through untold thousands of rounds of BBs. Outdoors, bugs with wings weren't safe. I remember setting up a target range in the basement when we got back home. I used playing cards as targets with the suits as the bulls eyes. A 10 of spades this had 12 bulls eyes...the ten spades in the middle of the card, plus the two in the corners.

That BB gun was remarkably accurate.

Lived on a hog/dairy farm. We had a bazillion sparrows and starlings. We would literally kill hundreds, actually probably thousands every winter.

We had a pest contest in FFA. You’d get points for mouse or rat tails and sparrow, starling, or pigeon heads. We would take them in by the sack full

Brother and I went through maybe five or six BB guns. Actually wear them out.

My first was a Daisy lever action. I don't remember the model , but it had wood stock snd forearm, a peep sight and a globe front sight with interchangeable sight inserts. I had that BB gun for 55 years, until last year. I put new seals in it and sent it to a friend for his son and daughter to enjoy. His daughter just turned 8, and in a years time has gone thru countless BBs, 2 cans of gun oil, and a silicone gun cloth. Makes me feel good that she is enjoying it and taking care of it instead of it sitting in the back of my gun safe going unused.

My first BB gun was a Daisy 880 pump which I still have. I was in charge of keeping the rabbits and other vermin out of grampa's garden and strawberry patch.

I had a break-barrel, single pump .177 pellet rifle made in Czechoslovakia that was my ever present companion growing up in the Texas Hill Country. Better times.

X62503 said:

I had a break-barrel, single pump .177 pellet rifle made in Czechoslovakia

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I had one of those as well. I paid 15 bucks for it brand new. Incredibly accurate compared to the Daisy’s I had My first one was an old Red Ryder my uncle gave me. It had a broken stock that got cut off like a mares leg. No doubt Wanted Dead or Alive had something to do with that

I shot thousands upon thousands of .177 pellets growing up, i have enough lead on my system to be EMP protected from just dropping them in my mouth for quick reload on a single pump gun.

My gun-shy mother finally allowed what was probably a 760 in the house one Christmas, as a gift for my 14-year old brother. I was sixteen and a member of our volunteer fire department at the time. We'd only had it out a few times until one night, when my mom was at work, he left the house with it, riding my other, 11-y/o brother's new BMX bicycle, also a Christmas gift.

When he didn't return after a while, I jumped on my motorcycle and went looking for him. Didn't take long; he was in the parking lot of a grocery store we lived in the neighborhood behind, surrounded by police officers. I talked to one of them and he recognized me from the FD. They agreed to release him with me. They kept the gun to release only to our mom if she came by the station.

My brother swore us to keep it from Mom, but she found out a month or so later when the lead officer actually stopped by the house to see her and ask if she was going to claim it. That did it for guns in the house for a long while (until I was 19 and her new-at-the-time husband convinced her to let him sell me a .22 rifle he had.)

We were never allowed to have BB guns, we got 22's when we were around 6. The old man said we'd treat the BB guns as toys, and he was right, those BB gun wars as teens were epic.

I didnt get my first pellet gun until I was almost 20, and that was a Sheridan Blue Streak. My first actual BB gun was one of those Star Wars looking freon powered BB Machineguns they were selling out of SGN back in the 70's. Ran like hell for a short bit and then it would freeze up.

Realizing my old man was right about the BB guns, our kids had Chipmunk 22's the day they were born and were shooting them early. We never had a BB/pellet gun in the house as they were growing up, as there was really no point. By the time they were at the BB gun wars age, paintball was the thing, and we did have those. Those wars were epic too.