Volume 20, Number 4,
April 1974:
With These Two Hands

Text-only version

ISSUE HOME PAGE

ABOUT THIS ISSUE
- about KSN

IN THIS ISSUE
- section 1
- section 2
- section 3
- section 4
- section 5
- section 6
- section 7
- section 8
- section 9
- section 10
- conclusion

With These Two Hands
by Robert J.Boles

With These Two Hands

by Robert J. Boles

Children today, with their mechanized toys, TV sets, playgrounds equipped with all kinds of rides, and lighted baseball diamonds and tennis courts, will find it hard to imagine how a lad of over sixty years ago kept himself occupied and entertained.

This was no chore for young Richard Schmidt, however. The "conveniences" mentioned above didn’t even exist when he was born on January 25, 1909. His father loved the land, and believed that hard work on the farm would occupy a person’s time, and provide for an honest, healthy living, even though there might be little money for anything else.

Richard, too, soon learned to love the land, and to work long and hard in the fields, but he also developed a great appreciation for the plants and animals about him. He especially enjoyed the birds, and spent some of his spare time carefully studying their shapes, behavior, and graceful maneuvers while in flight. These observations, along with native artistic ability, were to be of great help in what later proved to be his life’s work, the field of taxidermy.

It was a mounted owl that a friend received as a Christmas gift which first opened up such a world to him. He stood, open-mouthed, staring at the life-like stuffed skin that appeared to look fiercely back at him. "This is the kind of work I want to do," he felt like shouting.

Armed only with boyish enthusiasm, he decided to give it a try. A sling shot is not a very adequate collecting weapon for securing a specimen on which to work, and there simply wasn’t enough money to buy a gun. The stories he had read of Daniel Noone and the early pioneers gave him an idea. Why not make a gun? So, in 1922, at the age of 13, he built himself a matchlock pistol. The finished gun took two boys to fire it-one to hold it and to aim, the other to touch a match to the priming. No self-respecting bird was going to sit and let itself be collected with such commotion going on, so Richard decided a more sophisticated weapon was needed. With an inventive mind and the aid of the school encyclopedia, he converted the matchlock pistol into a cap-and-ball pistol, with a trigger and hammer lock. Now even cottontail rabbits fell prey to the young collector.