Sport: Skeet

Glen B. Watts of Lynbrook, L. I. has often broken 25 skeet targets in a row but he never enjoyed doing it so much as last week, when he was firing in the last round of the Great Eastern Individual Championship at Lordship, Conn. It was a dark, blustering day. Frank Trager of Roseland, N. J. and Ollie Mitchell of Waltham, Mass, had contrived to run up creditable strings of 96 out of 100. With 73 targets already broken—in strings of 25, 23, 25—Watts knew that he needed a 23 to tie, a 24 to win. Moving slowly around the half-circle he fired with concentrated rapidity and precision. He broke the first 14 without a miss, then the critical 15th and 16th from the centre station. Now came the doubles, at stations Nos. 1, 2, 6 and 7. He powdered the first three pairs and moved to station No. 8, needing one to tie, two to win. As both targets fell in bits to earth he threw off his hat, called for his final, unnecessary bird and smashed that too, for a brilliant 98 and the Great Eastern title.

Ollie Mitchell had the satisfaction of knowing that his 96 helped his Waltham Gun Club to win the Great Eastern team championship with 466, but most of the skeeters at Lordship last week felt a little less chipper about their scores when the results of the National Telegraphic Championship began to come in. The Izaak Walton League of Los Angeles had won the Telegraphic Team Championship with 473. Two Westerners—E. S. Neusch-wander of Los Angeles and George Debes of Houston—shooting under better weather conditions, had bettered Watts’ 98 by one target each and Thomas Mairs of Utica had tied it.

William Harnden Foster, editor of National Sportsman and Hunting and Fishing, claims credit for inventing skeet, in 1925. But as early as 1910 the late C. E. Davies and other Ballard Vale, Mass, gunners, Editor Foster among them, had hit on its basic idea. Ordinary trapshooting, with the gunner firing always from the same position, seemed too static to them. They wanted something more like real hunting. On the grounds of the Glen Rock Kennels they traced a great circle, set up a trap outside it, then moved around the circle potting the flying targets from all angles.

For over a decade the new sport remained a nameless Ballard Vale backlot pastime. Then Editor Foster decided to tell the world about it—chiefly because he wanted to boom the arms & ammunition business, get more advertising into his magazines. In February 1926 he launched a nation-wide promotional campaign, offered $100 for a name. The money went to a Montana rancher’s wife who suggested “skeet,” an obsolete word, probably Scandinavian, meaning “to shoot.”

There are now more than 800 skeet clubs with some 20,000 male & female skeeters in the U. S. and nine other countries. Twenty-six state associations in the U. S. are governed by a National Skeet Shooting Association, Inc. which publishes a monthly Skeet Shooting News (circulation, 1,500) patterned vaguely after TIME. Many U. S. sporting magazines carry a skeet department. Enthusiasts estimate 18,000,000 shotgun shells burned at skeet last year. Twenty-six state and some 20 intersectional shoots culminate yearly in the Great Eastern States and National Telegraphic Championships staged by the Remington Gun Club at Lordship, Conn. This year for the first time skeeters in the Great Eastern States shoot competed for a 28½-in. silver cup donated by Publisher Eltinge F. Warner of Field & Stream.

The old Ballard Vale full circle has now been cut in half, so that spectators need not move with shooters to keep out of gun range. The semi-circle’s diameter measures 120 ft. Two traps, one ten feet high, the other at ground level, are stationed off either end of the semicircle. They are pulled by remote control. One shooting stand (No. 8) bisects the diameter line, seven others are at equidistant points around the semicircle. Shooters fire from each stand at two targets thrown alternately from the two traps, then from stands 1, 2, 6 and 7 at two thrown simultaneously. The 25th target may be shot at from any stand. The skeeter’s ideal: to break all 25 targets, win membership in the “Twenty-Fivers’ Club.”

Skeet tries to duplicate the typical hunting situation of pointing dog, tense gunner, unpredictable game birds. Unlike trap-shooters, skeeters may not raise gun to shoulder until the target appears. That may be any time within three seconds after the shooter cries “Pull.” Skeeter Henry Bourne Joy, onetime president of Packard Motor Car Co., has invented an electric variable timer which throws targets with unbiased irregularity.

Famed among skeet shooters are Louis D. Bolton of Detroit, who holds the world’s long run record of 224 consecutive breaks (made with a 20-gauge gun) ; Ed Sransky of New Jersey, who broke the first straight 25 with a .410 bore (smallest) shotgun; the Waltham (Mass.) Gun Club, which holds the world’s team record of 486 breaks out of 500 targets. Some famed skeet enthusiasts: President Alvan-Macauley of Packard Motor Car Co., Publisher Orson Desaix Munn of Scientific American, Major-General Hanson Edward Ely, Financier James Alexander Stillman, Brigadier-General William Mitchell, Bernt Balchen, James Joseph (“Gene”) Tunney, John Barrymore.