I originally purchased the pistol that came to have a notch on the grip in 1965. Actually I had my 21 year old brother put it on layaway at Kmart. It was the original Ruger SA .22 design based on Colt’s with a few modern additions. It’s now referred to as the Old Model or Three Screw. One design that wasn’t changed from Colt’s was the trigger and hammer design. Safety cock, half cock for lowering the indexing lock to allow the rotation of the cylinder for loading/unloading and of course full cock which indexed and aligned the chamber and barrel for firing.
The safety cock was really a misnomer because the sear would not keep the hammer from striking and firing a round if the hammer was bumped or struck hard enough. The amount was pressure required is amazingly light. I read and was aware of the admonition in the Ruger manual to leave an empty chamber under the hammer of my six shooter as did many learned cowboys of yesteryear. Being an indestructible teenager I ignored that advice.
In 1966 I was with a friend on his grandparent’s property near Johnson City, Texas which was adjacent to LBJ’s Ranch. While it has no relationship to the incident it produced some interesting results afterward.
I answered the call of nature, which, required that I loosen my belt to which my holstered pistol was attached. The holstered and gun slipped off the belt and I tried to grab it, but only slowed it a little. As it fell I had many thoughts going through my mind. Of course the admonition about carrying an empty chamber under the hammer was foremost, but as that thought flashed by I considered the very short distance it would fall couldn’t be sufficient to drive the hammer into the firing pin. I was wrong.
I heard the discharge and felt the bullet strike me and still couldn’t believe I was shot. The blood I saw on my hand as I felt the wound convinced me otherwise.
I was down on a creek bank, out of sight from my friends and I guess because I was so stunned that the one foot fall had caused me to be shot I didn’t really yell out. They said they barely heard me without knowing what I said, but since they heard the shot they came to investigate.
My friend raced his 1966 Dodge Dart across the rocky terrain with me in the back seat thinking the undercarriage would surely come off as we bottomed out with every bounce . We made it to the highway and he had the little slant six whining in protest driving at top speed to the Johnson City Hospital, which today no longer exist.
I was evaluated by the only doctor at the 9 room hospital and then rushed into surgery, where he repaired all the holes in my organs produced by the .22 LR HP slug bouncing around my abdomen. I survived and was in the hospital a week and a half.
The day I got shot LBJ was at the ranch, in fact we had a lot of helicopters fly over while we were on my friend’s GP’s ranch. That evidently was the cause of a lot of speculation about the patient with a gunshot wound. I had a lot of faces peer around the slowly opened door to my room. I’d see them looking and then turn to say something to someone behind the door and then the door would slowly close. The nurses told me stories were circulating that I was an assassin wounded in an attempt on LBJ as well as one that I was Secret Service agent wounded in the attempt.
I thought that even though I survived I would put a notch on the grip to remind me how fortunate I was and to never again take gun safety for granted.
So there is the story behind my Old Ruger Single Six with the notched grip. Somewhere some scumbag has my little pistol and I sometimes wonder if they are at all curious about that notch.
The moral of the story is probably obvious, but I’ll mention it anyway. NEVER keep a live round under the hammer of an old style single action Ruger or Colt style pistol. It takes just a slight bump to fire the round as my story indicates, much less than you would think. A reply in my original post about the new gun informed me of the recall Ruger has on the old models and I realized there may be folks out there that could acquire an old unconverted model who may not know of the admonition about having a round under the hammer.
I apologize for being so long winded. To make this fit the Never Again category he’s my warning: Take heed if you have an old style cowboy pistol and don’t be a notch on the grip!
