Sport: Big Bang in Dallas

Skeet† is trapshooting with frills, designed to make trapshooting as much as possible like game-bird shooting. In skeet’s basic 25-shot round, each shooter follows an identical routine: 1) two single shots, from each of the eight field stations, at clay pigeons sprung into the air from each trap house at 70 m.p.h.; 2) double shots from stations 1, 2, 6 and 7, at birds sprung simultaneously, one coming toward him, one going away; 3) an optional shot from any station (bringing the total to 25 and usually taken wherever the gunner misses his first bird).

In Dallas last week, 400 of the best U.S. gunners met to shoot it out for the National Skeet championships (broken down into age, sex, gun-gauge, amateur and professional categories). A perfect round (25 hits, no misses) is fine shooting on anybody’s skeet field. But a 25 was commonplace to the eagle-eyed marksmen who blasted away at the Dallas Gun Club’s tent camp during the worst Texas heat wave in years.

Family Show. All week the skeet fields (24 in all) were circled by processions of competitors aiming at prizes in 38 major events, popping pump-gun .410s, banging cannonlike 12-gauges. Whole families were part of the show, fathers, mothers, sons & daughters, teaming up or competing against each other.

Some of the youngsters gave their elders some real scores to shoot at. Edward Harris, a twelve-year-old Galveston boy, knocked down 100 of 100 birds in the Sub-Junior championship for a new world’s record. In the Junior division Robert Smith, 16, from Silver Spring, Md., hit 248 out of 250 for another world’s record.

Glamor in Tweed. The tournament glamor girl was Cuban-born Carola Mandel, 31, wife of wealthy Chicago Department Store Owner Leon Mandel. A skeet shooter for only three years, steady-nerved Mrs. Mandel is already right up in the big time, last month won the Open High-Over-All title at Chicago, outshooting some veteran male marksmen to do it. In Dallas, wearing her regular plaid shirt & tweed skirt, despite the heat, she won the 20-gauge (100 out of 100) and small gauge (98 out of 100) competitions, for a split of the major women’s titles with Mrs. R. H. Hecker of Tucson, Ariz. Of the big 12-gauge gun, Carola says: “It begins to get very heavy and very long after a little while.”

On the last day, Staff Sergeant Glenn W. Van Buren of Fort Worth’s Carswell Air Force Base was tied with four others after a perfect 200-for-200 score in the All Gauge division. He had lost out last year because he missed one bird. But this year he never wavered. When the din and the powder smell had faded away, he had raised his score to 250 out of 250 in the shootoff, to become the first three-time champion (1948, 1949) in National Skeet history.

† From the Norwegian word skytte (shooter).