The Marksman Who Warned America About the Remington Nylon 66

Reno, Nevada. October 1959. A dirt lot on the edge of town. 13 days into something no American has attempted since 1907. A man in rolled shirt sleeves raises a 4-PB rifle for the 100,000th time. His name is Tom Fry and he works for a gun company. His target is a world record. 52 years old and never touched. His only tool is a rifle with a stock made of plastic, a gun half the country calls a toy.

The company that sent him wanted a photograph for a magazine. What Fry walked out of that lot with was 100,000 and four shattered blocks of pine lying in the dirt, a trigger finger worn through the skin in three places, and a letter from a 90-year-old man accusing him of cheating. The million American fathers who bought one of these rifles for $49.

95 and put it in a 12-year-old’s hands never knew the promise rested on those 13 days in the dirt. This is the story of Tom Fry, the last exhibition shooter any American gun company would ever employ. The plastic toy that outlived the men who mocked it, the factory that built it, and the counter that sold it. and the warning buried inside the promise he spent 13 days keeping.

The fall of 1960, a catalog lands on a kitchen table, 5 lb of newsprint, and a boy who is 12 turns straight to a page whose number he already knows. You went past the clothes, past the furniture, past the gadgets, and somewhere in there the fruitcakes. You did not slow down until sporting goods.

And you took a pencil to it, a circle, a star in the margin, so anybody looking later would know which one. The page is rifles Remington Nylon 66 Mohawk Brown $49.95. That price did not move for 10 years. 2 in away on the same page. A singleshot rifle for $12. To know what $49.95 meant in that kitchen, the same money bought a 3-speed English racing bicycle.

Now look at the names printed down that page. Sears had sold rifles under the JC Higgins name since 1908, and nobody named Higgins ever built one. Higgins was a bookkeeper who came out of Ireland and spent his life behind a desk. He was born without a middle name. The company added the C because it looked better on a rifle.

That bookkeeper’s name went on a million American guns. Now the money. A boy did not have $49.95. A boy had a paper route and a canvas bag, lawns and a push mower. Trading stamps licked and pressed in a page at a time at the kitchen table. A few saved two years and got there. Most thumbmed that page until it went thin and never got there.

For the ones whose fathers said yes, there was layaway. A dollar down in August, a dollar a week through the fall, a rifle in a stock room with a paper tag hanging off it, and a man’s last name on the tag waiting for December. Because you could buy a rifle nearly anywhere. In 1962, a five and dime company out of Detroit, opened a discount store in Garden City, Michigan, and called it Kmart.

3 years later, they put a flashing blue light on a pole and rolled it over whichever department they wanted cleared, and the whole store moved at once. There was a cafeteria in the middle of the building, steam trays under a heat lamp, plastic panels made to look like stained glass, brown and orange because that was modern.

Over the loudspeaker, smoking is only permitted in the cafeteria and down past housewares in a wooden rack with no glass and no lock on it. The rifles, Western Auto, Gambles, TGNY, the hardware store on the square with workc clothes on one wall and baloney sandwiches at the counter. A brick of 22 long rifle for $9.99.

A kid could ride down with money in his fist and ride home with a rifle across the handlebars and nobody would turn around. None of it required anyone to be talked into anything except this one. Because sometime in those years, a man in a necktie walks into one of those stores carrying a hard case, sets it on the glass, and takes out a rifle that weighs 4 lb.

He tells the men standing there, “The stock is not wood. It is plastic.” Nobody believes him, so he walks them out to the parking lot, has somebody throw blocks of wood in the air, and shoots them out of the sky until the arguing stops. That counter did not run on price. It ran on that man in the lot with the sun on him. His name was Tom Fry, and this was his job for more than 20 years.

Ohio, California, Montana, any town with a rack in it. He is the man in the dirt lot in Reno on the 13th day. And he stood behind more of these glass counters than almost anybody alive. He heard what a father said to a boy before reaching for his wallet. He watched what happened to those counters, too, and never said a word about it.

But before a man can swear to a rifle, somebody has to build it. And this one started in a laboratory. Wilmington, Delaware. December of 1926, days before Christmas. A long polished table, a room of men in dark suits, and Charles Stein at the end of it asking them to fund research with no clear-cut prospects for commercial development.

The committee is skeptical. They fund it anyway. The laboratory gets a nickname, Purity Hall. The man they put in it is 31. Wallace Hume Kurthers walks in in February of 1928 with one question. Whether a molecule can be built long enough to behave like a thread for 6 years, glassware and burners and nothing. Then on the 28th of February 1935, a chemist under him produces half an ounce of a new polymer in a beaker.

A man dips a glass rod into it and draws it out and a filament comes away with the rod. Kurthers had been sick most of his adult life with something the men around him had no good word for. He held close to 50 patents and had decided he had accomplished nothing. On the evening of the 28th of April, 1937, he checked into a hotel room in Philadelphia and killed himself.

A closed door, a drawn curtain, a bed nobody slept in. His daughter was born in November. Women modeled stockings made of his polymer under the lights of the World’s Fair in 1939. The man who made it never saw a pair. 600 mi north of that hotel room in a village on the Mohawk River, there is a brick factory going under.

By the early 1930s, 300 men are left inside it, coats and caps at the gate in the morning and most of the building dark. In 1933, the management does the only thing left and offers control of the company to somebody with money. On the 24th of May, 1933, DuPont buys 60% of Remington Arms. They will hold it for 60 years.

Everything Tom Fry will carry into that field in Reno is now sitting in two buildings in two states owned by the same men. A beaker in Delaware and a machine shop in New York. What did not exist yet was anybody in that machine shop willing to put the two together. Ilon, New York, 1955. A bar of dark polymer clamped in a bench vice. Metal shavings on the floor.

five men in shirt sleeves standing over it to find out whether you can cut a rifle out of a block of plastic. The man in charge is Wayne Leak, who runs research and development. The order was not romantic. The company wanted a cheaper 22, and the money was in the receiver and the stock. Walnut has to be cut, dried, shaped, sanded, finished, and thrown out when it warps.

So they went to the parent company with a list. Moldable into complicated shapes. Good in heat and in cold. Lubricates itself. And if you put a flame to it and take the flame away, it stops burning. And it had to hold its dimensions indefinitely, which is a way of writing forever, down on a sheet of paper.

The chemists came back with a formulation called Zaitel. The team machined a frame out of the raw bar and fired it 75,000 times. In January of 1958, every salesman in the country gets two prototypes in the trunk of his car with orders to put a thousand rounds through each under the worst conditions he can find. On the 23rd of February, a salesman named Delbert Connor mails his report to Wayne Leak.

And then the thing that nearly ended it, the company’s own management did not believe the rifle would sell, a plastic gun out of a factory making them from walnut and steel since 1816. Leak stood in front of the men in suits and lobbied and kept lobbying and finally got his way. The rifle goes on sale in 1959 and it ships with a small yellow paper tag stuck to the buttstock.

On that tag in writing is a guarantee from a chemical company to a man standing at a counter in Kansas. The stock will not chip. It will not crack. It will not fade. To make it stick, they ran samples over with truck tires and left them at the bottom of a lake for weeks before firing them.

But a guarantee is a piece of paper glued to a stock. And these men had been sold paper before. So the company went looking for somebody who could prove it in daylight with people watching. And for that, they needed a number nobody could argue with. There was one on the books. It had been sitting there since 1907. San Antonio, Texas, 1907.

A man named Adolf Toeerwine stands in a dusty field for 10 days in shirt sleeves and a hat while somebody throws blocks of wood in the air and he shoots at 72,59 of them and misses nine. Towerine shoots for Winchester. Before he shot for a living, he sat at a desk with a pen and an inkwell drawing cartoons.

His record stands for 52 years. Tom Fry came out of Ohio, a highway patrolman, then four years teaching gunnery in the war, then the gun company. He drew two, shooting silhouettes freehand through sheet metal. Two men who made pictures with bullets. 50 years between them. October of 1959. Reno, Nevada. Fry takes two weeks of his own vacation to do it.

Three rifles, nine hours a day, about a thousand shots an hour, 13 days. Somebody is throwing two and a half inch blocks of pine against a flat empty sky. One after another, brass shells turning in the air and landing in the dirt. And no way to speed it up and no way to stop. The rifles are cleaned three times in 13 days.

Not three times a day. three times. Four lbs lifted 100,000 times. By the end, the skin of his trigger finger is worn through in three places. 100,0 blocks, 100,04 hits, six misses. The company had what it paid for. And then it did something nobody remembers deciding. They swept up the field and filled sacks with the splinters.

and they began putting one of those shattered blocks into every box of rifles they shipped. Spring of 1960, a kitchen table. A boy who is 12 cuts the tape on a long cardboard box and lifts out a brown stocked rifle. And underneath it, packed in with the paperwork and the yellow tag, is a splintered block of pine with a hole punched clean through the middle.

He turns it over in his hand. He does not know it was in the air over a dirt lot in Nevada in October or what it cost a man’s hand to put it there. And in San Antonio, an old man who has just turned 90 sits at a desk with a fountain pen and writes Tom Fry a letter. The letter congratulates him and in the same breath it accuses him of cheating.

Toeerwine never accepted that his record had been broken. He went to his grave saying so, and there are men who collect these rifles today who will still tell you the count was not clean. There is no piece of paper anywhere that settles it. Nobody in that kitchen knew what the block of pine was either. The company never printed an explanation, and the boy never asked.

It went on a shelf or in a drawer or into the burn barrel out back with the box. That is how most of it went. Whoever handed you your first rifle, which store it came out of, what he was making an hour that year, why he took that one off the rack and not the one hanging beside it, none of it got written down, because he was standing right there in the kitchen, and there was never a reason to.

So, we are putting that world into a book while there are still men who can say it right. It is called a rifle for my son. The link is in the description and there is a QR code on your screen. Point your phone at it. And if this is the kind of thing you want more of, subscribe. Fry put the rifles back in the case and went back to work.

The rifles went into boxes and the boxes went onto trucks and the guarantee went out into the country to find out whether it was true. Northern Ontario, late fall, a week of rain that does not stop. Two men come out of the treeine at dark, wipe a rifle down with a coat sleeve, and put it away without taking it apart because the manual told them not to.

“Do not oil the action,” it said. Oil collects powder and grit and at 40 below oil turns to glue. The nylon lubricated itself, which is how a cheap plinker out of a discount store ended up doing serious work at the top of the continent. Trappers carried it on snow trails. There are accounts of hunters in the Arctic taking moose with one of these, not because it was the right tool, because it was the one that still worked. It fed people.

And in the middle of all that, the counter closed. In 1963, the president was killed with a rifle a man had ordered out of the back of a magazine. In the spring of 1968, Martin Luther King in Memphis and two months later, Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles. At the hearings that followed, in a room of microphones and men in suits, the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association testified in favor of ending mail order sales.

What Franklin Or said was, “We do not think that any sane American who calls himself an American can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.” The president signed it at a desk on the 22nd of October 1968. And the next fall, the catalog came and the page was not in it. Sears had been selling firearms since 1908, 60 years.

After that, they stopped. Not one brand. All of it. The rack and sporting goods got a lock on it, then a glass cabinet, then a form on a clipboard. Nobody sent a letter about that either. The rifle kept selling anyway. Through the 70s, through the 80s, and in 1989, it stopped. And here is why the plastic did not fail.

What wore out was the steel, the molds in Ilon, the tooling that squeezed the stocks, scored and worn past use. Somebody ran the numbers on cutting new ones, and the numbers said no. So, the last of these rifles ever built were made for one discount chain, a green stocked model sold only at Kmart. 54,783 of them. Then the presses came to rest.

1,58,000 rifles. And it ended because the steel gave out. Go open the safe. 60some years. A rack in the back window of a pickup through 15 summers. A 12-year-old who never cleaned it. And a grandson who never cleaned it either. Put a thumb on the stock. It has not chipped. It has not cracked. It has not faded.

The tag kept its word. Now look at what happened to everybody who signed it. Wilmington, Delaware, December of 1993. A pen, a stack of documents, a signature. After 60 years, DuPont hands Remington to a finance company and walks out of the gun business. What came after does not need 30 names. The company was bought and sold and went bankrupt twice.

Every time in a room with a long table and a window, a long way from the factory floor. Troy, Michigan, 2001. Kmart announced it would stop selling handgun ammunition. the statement. This was a business decision made in the best interest of the company. 7 months later, the chain filed for bankruptcy. 2,200 stores and then two dates in the same year in the same state and nobody put them together.

Ilon, New York, the 4th of March, 2024. The plant closed 208 years after Alifolet Remington forged his first barrel in a village of 7600 that had gone from 1300 jobs to 300. The notice came by email at 26 minutes past 3 on the 30th of November. The union answered in two words. Merry Christmas from Rem Arms.

Frank Brown ran a furnace in that building. 59. He grew up in a house across the street from the plant, raised on his parents’ paychecks from it. What he said was, “My mom worked there. My dad worked there. My wife works there with me now. My daughter works there with me now. My second daughter works there with me now. And my son-in-law works there.

His grandchildren are the first generation in that village who will not get the chance. and the mayor, John Stevens. I feel like a family member has died. My dad raised four kids on a paycheck from there for 37 years. He walked to work and carried his lunch every day. Bridge Hampton, New York, the 20th of October, 2024.

7 months later, the last full-size Kmart in the mainland United States closed. By that final week, the back half of the building was empty. Not only of merchandise, but of the shelving, a bare footprint on the concrete the size of a football field. Yellow signs taped in the windows. Everything must go.

Two sisters drove 1300 miles to stand in it because they had grown up in a store like it in Duth where their grandmother used to sit at a cafeteria table and write poetry. Tom Fry retired to Billings, Montana in 1973. The last man any American gun company would pay to stand in a field and prove a rifle with his own two hands.

He died there on the 14th of October, 1982 under a wide sky and a low line of mountains. He had told men at glass counters for 20 years that this rifle would outlast them. He was right. Nobody ever asked him about the rest of it. Not the letter, not the record, not the counters he had driven to since the war and what was happening to them by the time he stopped.

He was there, so there was no reason to, which is the whole reason for the book. One day, the man who could tell you is not standing in the kitchen anymore. And what is left is a rifle in a safe with another man’s hands worn smooth into the stock and nobody to tell you whose.

That is what a rifle for my son is for. If somebody ever put a rifle in your hands or there is a boy you mean to hand one to, the link is below and the QR code is on your screen. Ilion is what it looks like when nobody writes it down. This is us trying not to do that twice. The factory closed in March. The store closed in October. Same state, same year, 7 months apart.

And not one newspaper in this country ran them in the same sentence. Everybody in this story made a promise. The chemical company, the gun company, the store, the man in the field with his finger coming apart. The tag is the only one that kept it. So tell me about yours. Not what you think about plastic.

Which store it came out of and who was standing next to you when you carried it out.