Skeeter Skelton – my all time favorite gun writer
by Oyvind Haugen (Paper industry Web - associate webmaster)
Charles A. "Skeeter" Skelton was born on May 1, 1928 in Hereford, Deaf Smith County, TX, – the heart of the High Plains and the old Comanche and buffalo country and grew up during what’s known to history as the "Dust Bowl Days". The son of a merchant, rancher, farmer, and hunter, he developed an early interest in firearms, especially handguns, doing his first pistol shooting with his father's Colt Woodsman .22 when he was five.
Skeeter began acquiring and studying handguns during his adolescence and developed a strong attachment to large caliber single action revolvers. Perhaps partly owing to his interest in firearms, he spent only a brief time in college after serving in the U.S. Marine Corps and elected to follow law enforcement as a career. He served as a city patrolman in Amarillo, Texas, as a U.S. Border Patrolman on the last horse patrol in Arizona maintained by that agency, as deputy sheriff and then sheriff of his home Deaf Smith County, as a narcotics agent for U.S. Customs, and finally as Special Agent in Charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, from which position he retired in 1974 after an accident that nearly crippled him. After his retirement, his interest in firearms remained, and he acted as a consultant to various firearms manufacturers and occasionally demonstrated their products.
In 1966, Skeeter started writing for Shooting Times and was the magazine's Handgun Editor for 21 years. His first piece was a "Handguns" column, which appeared in the July 1966 issue. He authored more than 400 articles for Shooting Times and most of them were collected in four books: Skeeter Skelton On Handguns, Skeeter Skelton's Handgun Tales, Good Friends – Good Guns – Good Whiskey: Selected Works of Skeeter Skelton, and Hoglegs, Hipshots and Jalapenos: Selected Works of Skeeter Skelton.
Reading Skeeter’s stories will introduce the reader to a multitude of colourful characters. His "Me and Joe" stories of his depression era youth, while including references to period firearms, were character oriented rather than technical pieces. Of course Skeeter is "Me" in those stories, while "Joe" is his sidekick Jody O’Farrell Bishop. His "Dobe Grant" and "Jug Johnson" short stories were perhaps the only fiction routinely published by a popular shooting magazine. But all of Skeeter's stories had most of their background in real life.
The Dobe Grant character was the essence of a least four oldtimers Skeeter had known. Dobe’s ranch – The Turkey Track – was the Shipp Ranch in Webb County, TX. The Shipp was Skeeter’s favorite hunting grounds, the place of his long time friend Evan Quiros.
The personage of Jug Johnson was the result of many years of bombardment of letters, phone calls and personal visits by the delightful outer fringe of gun people who always wanted to embroil him in interesting, but highly improbable ventures involving handguns. Skeeter once said –"Jug Johnson has seemed to develop entirely on his own, with me a mere translator. I hope to keep it that way" – and he did.
In 1978, Skeeter was named the sixth recipient of the Outstanding American Handgunner Award. Blessed with a loyal following of readers, he promised to keep writing gun related material "until my typewriter freezes over" – and as always, he kept his word.
I believe that while most of his readers realized he had been seriously ill for a long time, his death came as a blow and a shock to many of us. I can still remember that day in early 1988 when I got the issue of "Shooting Times" that told of his passing.
Skeeter passed away on Sunday, January 17, 1988, at Sun Towers Hospital in El Paso, Texas.
There will never be another like him, but as another person has written before me: As long as his words remain, Skeeter is still with us!
Posted November 15, 2007