Finding Papa's Guns

    It has been 50 years since Papa died. Since that July day in 1961, Ernest Hemingway’s status as an American icon has only grown. His life and work have been celebrated (and dissected) in movies, museums, festivals, Websites, and hundreds of articles and more than 40 books. Baby Boomers likely came to know Papa in their high school English classes through the pages of The Old Man and the Sea, which helped earn its author a Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954.
    So what made this team of Boomer history detectives think we could add anything meaningful to all this Hemingway information—and what focused our attention on this project? Two years ago Silvio Calabi was asked to write about Hemingway’s safari battery. Roger Sanger, who spends part of the year in Ketchum, Idaho, where Hemingway had a home, and Steve Helsley were helping with research and background information. Calabi made periodic visits to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, in Boston, which houses Hemingway’s manuscripts, letters and photos. Sanger, with input from Mike Riedel, the former owner of Sun Valley Magazine, began uncovering Hemingway sources in Idaho. Helsley approached Bob Beach, the keeper of the records at Griffin & Howe, where Hemingway bought many of his guns, to seek his support. As the interviews, paperwork and computer files piled up, it became clear that, despite the great interest in every aspect of “Papa” Hemingway’s remarkable life, there was no truly definitive accounting of the guns that figured so prominently in it.
    For all of his considerable big-game hunting, Hemingway was, first and last, a shotgunner—a very capable one. And he was a gun “accumulator,” not a collector. He was interested in function and had little use for engraving or upgraded wood. He understood how custom fitting benefited accuracy and handling, but he ordered few, if any, bespoke guns. He rarely used his pair of “fancy” Spanish side-by-sides and seemed embarrassed by them. His favored shotguns came from America, England, Italy, Germany and Belgium. Most of them were second-hand. Like all of us, he snapped up good, useful guns when and where he found them; but his favorite source was Abercrombie & Fitch, New York City’s legendary sporting-goods store and outfitter, which he patronized for 30-some years.
    A&F acquired retailer Von Lengerke & Detmold in 1929 and Griffin & Howe in 1930. VL&D had been importing guns from Europe since 1900 and had refined inventory and tracking systems for its New York and Chicago (Von Lengerke & Antoine) stores. A&F adopted VL&D’s record-keeping but let G&H use a different system. G&H was split off in 1964; A&F closed its doors in 1977. The A&F, VL&D and some of the VL&A records have survived; old G&H records have not. In the basement of G&H’s headquarters, in New Jersey, is a floor-to-ceiling rack of ledgers—60 books with almost 12,000 pages annotating the firearms that moved through these companies from 1901 to 1977. The pages carry the names of financiers, potentates, celebrities and plain folks. Bob Beach, a retired teacher with a yen for good guns, took on the monumental task of sorting out this mountain of information and has created what amounts to a fine-gun DNA database. Fortunately for us, Beach and his boss, G&H CEO Guy Bignell, became enthusiastic supporters of our Hemingway project.
    Many of Papa’s guns have been described, in varying degrees of specificity, in writings by and about him. Those and old photographs, auction catalogs, gunmakers’ records, phone calls, letters and interviews—with, for example, Bud Purdy and Forrest MacMullen, Papa’s surviving Idaho friends and hunting companions—and even the Shooting Sportsman Website Bulletin Board were the hunting grounds for our research. When enough detail piled up, Beach dove into the A&F books. If guns had been bought through A&F (post-1929), they’d be in the records. Also, in 1963, two years after Papa’s death, his widow, Mary, shipped several of his guns to A&F for consignment sale.
    At least five of Papa’s guns have moved through auction houses. In a 2007 James D. Julia sale, two high-mileage Skeet-grade 20-gauge Winchester Model 21s—Nos. 14267 and 15593—were sold to a “Michigan collector.” Mary had willed these guns to a Bruce Tebbe of Los Angeles, and he got them upon her death in 1986. The auction catalog claimed that “Ernest had ordered both guns.” The A&F ledgers show that No. 15593 was sold to Hemingway on December 18, 1940, for $117.30. There is no A&F record for No. 14267, which, with its 12-3/4" length of pull and “M.G.H” on the silver grip cap, was almost certainly bought for Martha Gellhorn, who became wife No. 3 on November 21, 1940. In his 1969 book High on the Wild with Hemingway, Sun Valley friend Lloyd Arnold wrote that when he saw Martha’s gun in 1940, it had two sets of barrels; the auctioned gun had only one set. There is a third Hemingway Model 21 as well, No. 32447, a 12-gauge that was made for Papa by Winchester when he was named “Outdoorsman of the Year” in 1959. It wasn’t completed until after his death and is now in the Cody Firearms Museum, in Wyoming.
    From time to time Beach produced surprises. On October 16, 1942, Papa bought a 12-gauge over/under by Gebruder Adamy (No. 29392) that had been consigned to A&F by “Mrs. W.F. Beal.” Adamy is still a gunmaker in Suhl, Germany. We have yet to find references to this gun in any writings by or about Hemingway. Another example is a .22 semi-automatic rifle: On November 7, 1959, A&F sold Hemingway a Winchester Model 77 (if you’re running to your gun safe right now, it bore Serial No. 99709) for $53.95. Papa generally didn’t care for “autos,” so this is puzzling. Then Forrest MacMullen told us that Hemingway gave away a cased set of Walther PP pistols—a .22 long rifle and a .32 ACP. Forrest got the .32 (No. 311298), and inadvertently we identified another previously unknown Hemingway firearm. How’s that for detective work?

Confusions, Conclusions
    Even what seems to be a documented Hemingway gun can lead to confusion. R.L. Wilson’s book The World of Beretta mentions that Papa bought a 12-gauge SO3 (No. 5991) over/under in Venice in December 1949. Mary Hemingway, however, wrote that it was in the fall of 1948, and letters from Ernest seem to agree. This was evidently the “new gun” he used for duck shooting with Baron Nanyuki Franchetti in the lagoon northeast of the city, when Hemingway joked that he’d been “shooting in a Venetian blind.” It had 27-1/2" barrels, double triggers and a 13-1/2" length of pull. This was among the guns consigned to A&F in ’63; it was sold to a Cy Mueller of Bozeman, Montana, on August 19 that year for $250. A&F’s ledger, however, indicates that there was also a second, single barrel. A single barrel on an over/under game gun? Peter Horn, manager of the Beretta Gallery in Manhattan, who bought the gun when it resurfaced at auction in 1999, told us there was no second barrel, that the gun is marked “S3” (not “SO3”), and there is no difference between an S3 and an SO3. (This may vex some Beretta buffs.)
    One of the dangers of real detective work is reaching conclusions too quickly. Sanger contacted Sean Larkin, whose father had a ranch in Gannet, Idaho, where Papa hunted. Larkin had inherited a 12-gauge Merkel over/under, No. 26724, that he believed had belonged to Hemingway. We thought Papa owned a pair of Merkels, so we quickly made two assumptions, both incorrect: first, that Larkin’s gun was part of that pair, and second, that the serial number of its mate would be one digit higher or lower.
    Beach reported that he had no record of No. 26724. He had, however, located a pair of Merkels numbered 19342 and 19865. Both were 3" 12s with sets of 28- and 32-inch barrels and adjustable combs. The pair had been consigned by “W.G. Brokaw” and then sold, on March 12, 1945, to “E. Hemingway” for $1,500—making them perhaps the most costly of Papa’s guns.
    Hemingway had arrived from Paris, at the close of WWII, just a few days before and had been ramming around New York with his middle son, Patrick, who was then just 16. On the very next day, March 13, Hemingway wrote a long and loving letter to Mary, soon to be his fourth wife, which includes this paragraph: “When found we had 20,000 C.O.H. [cash on hand] all debts paid I bought 2 shotguns as no sense going around . . . with no guns and have had no chance to buy anything for so long . . . . They were second hand and belonged to an old bastard I could always beat in old days but he had fanciest guns in the world and now he’s dead and I have the guns. If can’t shoot them will sell to some S.A. [South American] millionaire.” William Gould Brokaw, a generation older than Hemingway, was a wealthy “clubman” who favored pigeon shooting, yacht racing, high-end cars and women.
    Einar Hoff, of Merkel USA, unearthed the “gun cards” from the factory records in Suhl. These were in German, so the next call was to our friend Dietrich Apel, founder of the German Gun Collector’s Association. Dietrich said the instructions for these two Merkels were the most extensive he had ever seen. They were Model 303s of “Holland & Holland type” (sidelocks) and had been made for “WGB.” The first was completed on June 25, 1931, and its Schwesterflinte (sister gun) on December 12, 1932. A Churchill over/under had been provided to serve as a model for the engraving. The first gun had a gold “1” on the breech—a strong indication that it was meant to be one of at least a pair, even though there was a delay (in time and serial numbers) in building the second gun. We have found only one Merkel reference in Papa’s writings: In Under Kilimanjaro, which is about Hemingway’s 1953-’54 safari, he mentions “a very beautiful twenty-eight-inch barrel over-and-under Merkel [that] had fitted me and I had shot . . . for many years.”
    However, the 15-inch length of pull on these guns was a full 1-1/2" more than those on his Beretta S3 and Winchester 21. The original work cards also note “cast on for a left-handed shooter”—which Papa was not. To add to the mystery, these exceptional guns seem to have disappeared.

The Model 12
    The shotgun to which Papa was most attached was his 12-gauge Winchester M12 pumpgun, which had been in a fire at his in-laws’ home in Arkansas. Papa described it as “fast as a snake” and finished a wounded leopard with it in Africa as well as untold gamebirds. About 1958 Papa declared that after 200,000 rounds it was worn out (Lloyd Arnold said it was “a weapon you wouldn’t give ten dollars for”) and bought a used Model 12 with a Flex-Choke from a hotel bellboy. That gun had come to Sun Valley for the famous trap shooter Rudy Etchen to test the choke device. As Etchen was a Remington rep and a Model 870 shooter, when the testing had been completed he’d sold it to the bellboy.
    Hemingway’s original Model 12, No. 525488, made c.1928, with a 30-inch barrel, was among the guns consigned to A&F in 1963. It was sold, on August 2, 1963, for $35 to a young man named John Nodop, who had no idea of its provenance. He refurbished the gun and then traded it away around 1980. If you know of a field-grade M12 with a bird’s-eye maple stock, please check the serial number and then call us.

At the End
    Ironically, perhaps the least known of Papa’s guns is the one that most likely ended his life. The Wikipedia entry is typical of what is widely accepted: “Hemingway is believed to have purchased the Boss & Co. shotgun he used to commit suicide through Abercrombie & Fitch.” Some accounts add that A&F’s Charlie Wicks sold Papa the gun. We assumed that, with Bob Beach’s help, identifying the Boss would be relatively easy. If it was a Boss, that is: Other sources claim it was the Model 12 or his Browning; the August 2008 issue of Russia’s ????? ? ???????   (Hunting & Fishing) magazine identified the suicide gun as a Bernardelli.
    While Beach was searching his ledgers and Calabi was reading the literature for Boss mentions, Sanger was ferreting about in Idaho. Soon after Papa’s death, the gun that Hemingway had turned on himself was handed over to Brooks Welding, in Ketchum. It was cut up with a torch and the pieces buried in a field. Mike Dechevrieux, a local gun collector, casually mentioned to Sanger that some of the pieces of the gun might still exist. Sanger made a beeline for the welding shop. The proprietor, Mike Brooks, is the grandson of Elvin Brooks, who destroyed the gun in 1961. Mike inherited the shop from his father, Allen—who still had the pieces. Although their existence was no secret, Sanger was apparently the first to ask about them. The remnant scraps amount to three bits of shattered stockwood, portions of two triggers, part of a barrel lump and a small chunk of a left rear lockplate.
    Sanger took photographs, and everyone’s immediate reaction—This is no Boss!—was borne out by expert opinion from gunmaker David Trevallion. Among other things, the screw that holds the intercepting-sear spring is in the wrong place. So it wasn’t a Boss; but what was it? Dechevrieux examined the tiny bit of lockplate and proclaimed that the border engraving was that of a W&C Scott Monte Carlo B. Approximately 2,000 Monte Carlo Bs were made between 1897 and 1935; sidelock bar-action ejectors of middle quality, they were primarily configured as pigeon guns. Papa had bought a used Scott in northern Italy in the fall of 1948. Lloyd Arnold wrote that it was a pigeon gun, that for some reason Papa called it “the Adams gun,” and that Hemingway had “liked it as well as any he had ever owned.”
    Forrest MacMullen was also familiar with the Scott. In January 1960 he sent it to A&F to have the triggers “honed” and the European sling swivels removed. Although he chooses to believe that Papa’s death was an accident, MacMullen agrees that the Scott was most likely the gun that caused it.
    One of Helsley’s friends, Rob Shelton, offered a Monte Carlo B (No. 60293) for comparison, and Allen Brooks loaned Helsley the scraps for evaluation. Comparing the left sidelock from Shelton’s Scott to the piece provided by Brooks leads to an inescapable conclusion.
    We can’t tell whether Scott or a supplier made the lock provided by Brooks. We also don’t know what changes, if any, may have been made to the sideplates or lockwork over the 38-year production run of the Monte Carlo B. We know that the remnant screw from the destroyed lock does not exactly fit the plate provided by Shelton (it is slightly larger). Finally, we showed these photos to engraver Charles Lee, ex-Purdey’s. The first words out of his mouth were, “It’s not a Boss.” The scrap looked like a Scott to him also.
    Our searches of the literature and photographs, as well as interviews, found no evidence that Hemingway had owned a Boss. No law enforcement incident reports still exist. Finally came word from Bob Beach: “I have reviewed all [A&F] Boss guns up through 1960 and have not seen any transaction involving Hemingway.”
    How did the Boss legend begin? Papa had a penchant for nicknames and calling one thing something else, and anyone unfamiliar with fine guns easily could be misled. Perhaps an admirer simply wanted such a famous life to have ended with a famous gun. What is clear is that Papa’s W&C Scott gun is nowhere to be found. The pieces that were buried in an Idaho field in 1961 are probably still there. However, they now lie beneath the home of Adam West, aka Batman.

The Search
    Hemingway acquired and gave away guns wherever he went, and his life and writing style make it difficult to nail down exactly what he owned. What, for example, was the Spanish “Duke of Alba” double that allegedly had its Damascus barrels damaged in Cuba and that was mentioned by Lloyd Arnold, Jack Hemingway and others? It is likely that the Spanish firm J.M. Urriola of Madrid was the source of some of Papa’s guns—which might explain, in part, why they are not in the A&F books. Hemingway gave Bud Purdy a 12-gauge Sarasqueta (No. 19196) from Urriola and had a cased pair of Spanish guns himself. There are more: A.E. Hotchner wrote of a pair of Purdeys in True Magazine in 1971 that no one seems to know anything about. In 1939 Hemingway won a 12-gauge Browning Superposed from Ben Gallagher, a wealthy American, in a live pigeon match in France. It often appears in photos of him and his famous playmates from the Idaho years. The gun was in no way exceptional, but where it went is a mystery. Where is Papa’s first shotgun, the single-shot 20 that he received on his 10th birthday, July 21, 1909?
    Such is the ongoing challenge for Shooting Sportsman’s “history detectives.” There is much more to learn.

Authors’ Note: Thanks again to Bob Beach for his tireless work. Beach will search the G&H records for you, too. Go to www.griffinhowe.com and click on “research.” If he finds something, the fee is $50. He provides not just a copy of the ledger page; if possible, he includes information on the consigner and buyer, too.

This is the continuation of “Wingshooting with Papa,” which appeared in September/October, and a small foretaste of a book on Hemingway’s guns by the same authors that will be published by Shooting Sportsman Books later this year. Roger Sanger, Steve Helsley and Silvio Calabi write often about interesting guns, and from 2001 to 2006 they produced the Gold Medal Concours of Fine Guns (now owned by the NRA). Sanger lives in California and Idaho and is the founder of the California Side by Side Society. Helsley, a retired law-enforcement executive, is a consultant to the NRA as well as a firearms historian and photographer. Calabi lives in Maine and has been associated with SSM since 1993.