![]() ![]() If Lady Luck didn’t happen to be on our side we had to do an awful lot of shooting to get many sparrows. One might curve to the left and when we corrected for that the next one would curve to the right. ![]() We used to sort out pebbles, using only the roundest and smoothest, but even so it was impossible to get them perfectly uniform. When I was a boy, the toughest problem was finding good ammunition. The ones that survived had no doubts about man’s being there enemy. They can fly as well as the old ones, which left at once, but they didn’t know the facts of life. The Willow ticket where we beached the boat was full of young magpies. And one day three or four years ago the bass were most unappreciative and we finally went ashore to take a snooze. I’ve killed several rattlesnakes with it. Sometimes I don’t use it, but occasionally it pays its way. I usually take my beany along in my tackle box when I go fishing. I’ve probably killed more grouse with my flipper than any other kind of game. Aerial targets are tougher, but not too difficult, and something that breaks when hit-a clay pigeon for example-is ideal. We don’t hit it every time, of course, but we do connect often enough to make the competition pretty keen. Sometimes in camp we hang up a tin can on six feet of string, and at a range of twenty-five or thirty feet we can keep it swinging like crazy. My boys got interested when they were about eight and 10, and I help them get started. That was one of the best things I ever did. The rubbers were rotten, but the leather pouch and the crotch, which I had cut from an apple tree, were still good. After I had recovered from this foolishness, I was down at the home place one day and got to rummaging through a bin where my mother had put a lot of boyhood things. Like all other boys, I had to pass through the ages-the important age, the dignified age, the girl age, the serious age, any ambitious age. The time eventually came, of course, when I laid my beany aside. I could carry it in my pocket ammunition was free and made no noise I didn’t have to chase arrows and I was more accurate at close range with the flipper than I was with a bow. I had a gun in those days and also suffered with archery for a while, but the beany got more use. Legal targets were English sparrows, magpies, crows, snakes, and frogs, but the sparrows were handy, abundant, and pestiferous, so naturally I shot more of them than anything else. My father wouldn’t tolerate killing songbirds or blackbirds, which he considered beneficial, although they were not protected by law. They could fly, of course, but they were less suspicious than the adults, most of which had been shot at before. The best hunting came about school-out time, just after the young birds had left the nest. I can remember going out to weed the garden with a beany in my pistol pocket and carefully selected pebbles in another, and it was a rare day when I didn’t knock over a sparrow or two. People trapped and poisoned them, but they throve in spite of this persecution, and they made ideal targets-both sporting and available. We farmed with horses-I doubt if there are a dozen farm boys in the country now who could harness a team-and the English sparrow was at the height of its glory. That was in the days when the Model T had yet to prove its superiority over the horse. I discovered, probably in the fourth or fifth grade, that I could hit things with it being flipper. The fact that I would rather have worn Babe Ruth’s shoes than those of the President didn’t exactly set the major league scouts to fighting for my talents, and so when I hit on something for which I seemed to have a knack, sticking to it was only natural. One year when the coach was short of men I made a basketball letter, but that was the closest I ever came to winning fame as an athlete. When I was a boy, I ran to hands and feet. I developed the word on the same principle as archery, which, as everybody knows, means shooting with an archer. The dictionary people haven’t revised their book to include “flippery” yet, so I’ll define it. ![]() One of mine in particular-flippery-has paid a handsome dividend on an extremely modest investment. His boys are young yet mine are reaching the age where their hobbies make some of the old man’s minor vices seem very economical. MY FRIEND DOC JONES says the difference between men and boys is that men’s games are more expensive. Ted Trueblood fires his flipper (aka slingshot) for this classic column. Trueblood was the original Total Outdoorsman-skilled in hunting, fishing, and, as you’re about to read, flinging a slingshot. “The Art of Flippery” by Ted Trueblood, first appeared in the January 1963 issue. ![]()
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