Fort Wayne Rifle and Revolver Club

Wildcat Valley Rifle and Pistol Club hosted the Indiana 300-Yard Reduced Course State Championship on Saturday, August 27th and the Fort Wayne Rifle and Pistol Club was well represented at the event.  Mark Richard, Mike Habel, Mike King and Juniors Marshall Rohrbach, Kileen Shaffer and Addiysn Shull made up the shooting contingent and Mike Grannis and Larry Beardsley were there as the support group.  Larry acted as the Range Officer for the match and Mike was the Statistical Officer as scores were tallied at match end.

The 300-Yard Reduced Course State Championship title was captured by Wildcat Valley Junior Madelyn Schnelle with an impressive 791-31X score.  Madelyn dropped 5 points in the first 10 shots in Offhand and then dropped only four more points across the rest of the match.

FWRR’s Mark Richard took First Master with 779-29X.  Mike Habel continued a season long hot streak taking First Expert with a 757-12X.  Marshall Rohrback came away with First Junior, two points behind Doc with a 755-12X.

Miss Addiysn gets the recovery and heart attack award for the day.  In her second string of prone rapid fire, she had a round mis-feed about halfway through her second magazine.  Addy racked the bolt, ejected the misfed cartridge and then finished off the magazine, but she was still one shot short of the ten shots she needed for the string.  Time was running out and the last round was somewhere underneath her. She rolled over on her right side (she’s a lefty), found the loose round, reloaded it – closed the bolt, got back in position on target and got off the final shot just as the last second ticked off the clock and I whistled “CEASE FIRE”.  She closed out her second rapid fire prone string with a 96-1X score!  GREAT RECOVERY Young Lady!

The next match in the Indiana Triple Crown of State Matches is the 100-Yard Reduced Course Championship at Fall Creek on September 10th and the series completes with a two-day dual 80-round tournament (1600 point aggregate) at Camp Atterbury on September 17 and 18.

The Fort Wayne Rifle and Revolver Club has been around for more that 100 years. We have evidence that hints that as far back as 1914 there was an organized group of shooters who later became the Fort Wayne Rifle and Revolver Club, but there is a surprising lack of recorded history. 

Reflecting that long history, on occasion artifacts occasionally show up that give us some insight into our ancestors.  Recently an old award plaque wandered into the Bruggeman Building (the mower house) that made us do some looking.  The trophy is “The Major John C. Houck Memorial Trophy”, presented by Lt. Colonel Sam L. A. Bowlin.

The trophy is a walnut plaque with a prone rifleman and a brass plate with names of individuals to whom the award was given. The trophy is in pretty good shape, but the shooter has lost the barrel of his rifle over the years.  It appears to have been intermittently awarded – there is not an award noted for every year.  It was first awarded in 1963 to J. H. Miller who scored 134 x 150.  This was probably a 30-shot match fired on the old 5V target.  By 1967 the match format had changed when Lynn Richter won the award with a 287 x 300 score, a 30 round match on the new 10X target.

By 1973 the match format had changed again when Lowell Black won with a 339 x 400 score.  The award stood vacant until 1987 when Mike Grannis won it with a 294 x 300 score (another format change, back to a 30 round match).  Mike recalls that the match was “ … kind of like a President’s 100 Match”.  The plaque was awarded to Mike Gingher in 1990 and last awarded to John Hoham in 1991.  Its whereabouts since then is a mystery until it showed up in the Bruggeman Building.

Now, who are the two individuals involved in the name and donation of the award?  As of now, we don’t know a lot.  We find First Lieutenant John C. Houck listed in the early 1920’s as a member of the Fort Wayne contingent of the Indiana National Guard and in 1925 there are records of him shooting in Indiana rifle and pistol matches with the Indiana Guard teams.  There is evidence that by 1945 he had been promoted to Major where he served the Philippines as a company commander.  The fact that the trophy is the “Major John Houck Memorial Trophy” infers that Major Houck had passed away some time prior to 1963, the date the trophy was first awarded.

Lieutenant Colonel Sam L. A. Bowlin is also a bit of a mystery.  Old records show him as the Post Intelligence Officer at Fort McClellan, Alabama in late 1942.  In 1965 he shows up in the Army Reserve Magazine as being on the Fifth United States Army Team that shot the first year that the Army Reserve was represented at the National Matches at Camp Perry.  We know from club memories that he lived down around Decatur – but not a lot more than that. 

The trophy will be mounted in the new clubhouse as a reminder of the FWRR’s heritage.

The Juniors finally got their chance to “Go Downtown” – try their hand at shooting 600-yards. 

It took us most of two High Power Shooting seasons, but we arranged a session at the Hillside 600-yard range.  They have shot a lot of matches at 200 and 300-yards, but I was curious to see how they would respond to their first try at shooting at a target over a third-of-a-mile away from them.  I was not too concerned about actual scores – we were not going to do a lot of knob turning on scopes – I wanted them to see that shooting at 600-yards wasn’t all that different from 300-yards – it just takes the bullet longer to get there!   

I should have known what was going to happen; I should not doubt this group of young women. I had them put their 300-yard zeroes on their rifles and then come up an additional thirteen minutes of elevation.  Most of them were on paper the first shot and after some sighting shots, they started a 20-shot string at 600-yards. 

When the smoke cleared and the brass was picked up, I was impressed by how well they did. Miss Mia shot the high score of the evening with a 176-3X.  It was a well centered group and it did not show the two-group tendency she has shown on 300-yard prone targets.  (She really did shoot 20-shots, I didn’t do a sighter conversion for her). Good job young lady! 

Miss Addiysn was close on her heels with a 175-1X.  Her group was well centered as well.  I kidded Addiysn that only six weeks ago she was killing antennas and sensors and now she is solidly holding the black at 600-yards, a lot of improvement. 

Miss Kileen shot a group about a minute and a half high with a 162-1X, but it was well centered and had it been down a bit it would have clustered in the black.  As I mentioned earlier, I wasn’t into a lot of knob turning for this session or we would have tried to move the group a bit.   Kileen noted that at 600-yards, it just takes a little wiggle to move things a lot. 

Mr. McKee, the Hillside Range Officer and an FWRR member, closed the day with a comment; “Beard, you have a bunch of good shooters there”. 

Way to go Ladies; you make us proud!

Saturday. August 13th continued our string of good luck days for high power matches.  It was overcast most of the morning, about 55-degrees at 8:02 when we sent the first shot downrange.  When we finished at 11:04, it was only 64-degrees, a very comfortable day for shooting.  Our ranks of shooters were thinned out a bit; we had five of our regular shooters call in sick (either with WooHooFloo or recovering from it) and two shooters decided that they wanted to  uphold the FWRR reputation at the 600-yard match at Atterbury .  Even so we had eleven shooters on the line and we had a good match.

It was Jim Jackson’s day; he took first place for the match aggregate with a 770-22X and he dominated both prone stages, with a 399-16X across both prone stages.  He dropped one point in the first prone rapid stage, cleaned the second prone rapid and then continued to clean prone slow with a 200-9X.  Congratulations to Jim for a great match.

Second place went to Mark Walters with a 758-24X – third going to a guest from South Bend, Pete Yarbro with a 751-13X.  (Pete is a guest, but not a stranger to us).   Mia King took advantage of a massive two-magazine  cross-fire to take top Junior with a 711-4X count to take the Top Junior place.

 Marshall Rohrbach, one of our Juniors, won the Offhand Match with a 188-1X.  Mark Walters took first for Sitting Rapid with 199-8X .  And, Jim Jackson dominated Prone Rapid (199-7X) and Prone Slow (200-9X) to take first in both matches.

We had an issue with slow target response in all of the rapid fire stages and after I got home and looked at some of the information stored in our line servers, I was able to figure out why.  I’ll try to be brief.  I can look at valid and invalid shots in each target log.  In the rapid fire stages there were many invalid shots logged in each string.  Our targets operate on sound – and yesterday morning was a cool, humid morning.  Sound carried well yesterday. Shots from adjoining targets were being logged, and the system had to decide if they were valid on-target shots or invalid shots. The system got overloaded and it took it some time for it to figure things out.  No shots were lost, but the slow response caused confusion with some shooters.

To prevent this from happening in the future, I will not simultaneously shoot adjacent targets on rapid fire strings.  We will shoot odd targets then even targets to prevent this from happening again.  I apologize for any confusion that was caused – we’re still learning even after operating this long with the system.  (Please, remind me of this in case I forget…).

Our next match will be on Thursday, August 18th – a regular practice night.  This will be an NRA National Match Course (50-rounds) fired from the 100-yard firing line on the electronic targets.  Just a caution, there may be a waterhole in front of the line, so bring bug spray for ‘skeeters.  This is a “No Match Fee” free match, but if you want scores sent to the NRA, please bring $5 for NRA processing fees.

ONE MORE THING … Saturday, August 27th will be the Indiana State 300-Yard Championship at Wildcat Valley.  It looks like we have a group of Juniors going down to shoot and it would be great to have a FWRR contingent there to take back 300-Yard Bragging Rights for 2022.

WOW!  While I was out playing around with the Juniors, I missed a heck of a match back here at home.

We had thirteen shooters come to the line for the July 30 Mid-Range Tournament.  It was a combined any-sight/iron-sight tournament and there were five shooters who chose to shoot iron sights in one or more matches.  SO – since I had promised to recognize iron sight shooters, I chose to make Iron Sight and Overall Match awards.

The Iron Sight Match was designated as Match 3 and five shooters shot irons in that match.  Iron Sight match standings were:

First:                     Mark Walters     192-7X

Second:                Dean Drews       181-9X (CREEDMOOR!)

Third:                    Mike Habel         181-2X 

Overall  Tournament Standings were:

First: Ron Dague          596-36X(CREEDMOOR! – again)    (Scope, scope, scope)

Second:     Jim Jackson         596-29X        (Scope, scope, scope)

Third:      Mark Walters     589-30X                       (Scope, scope, irons)

There were several  198’s and 199’s shot in individual matches. Ron Dague shot a 200-14X clean in Match 2 and and Jim Jackson cleaned his target in Match 1 with a 200-11X score.  It speaks very well to the quality of our shooters when both the iron sight and overall results had standings decided by X-counts!

Thanks again to Mike Grannis for doing the Stat Office and Admin duties and to Mark Walters for running the line and  shooting  at the same time.  It’s hard to do both things at once.  And, thanks to all of the shooters who made things run smoothly.           

The Junior High Power Shooters of Indiana were well represented at the USMC Advanced Firing School and the USAMU Small Arms Firing School.

FWRR Juniors, in purple and green T-shirts attended the Small Arms Firing School and other Indiana Juniors, in the red sweatshirts, attended the advanced USMC class.

FWRR Junior Marshall Rohrbach, second from right, shooting in his first match at Camp Perry finished 17th of 267 competitors with a score of 376-6X. By finishing in the top 10% of the competitors in this special EIC Match, Marshall earned 4 Distinguished Rifleman Leg Points. Way to go Marshall!!

The next FWRR competitor was Kileen Shaffer, 79th of 267 with a 357-3X. Addisyn Shull and Mia King rounded out the FWRR group with 176th and 220th places, respectively.

Probably more importantly, Col. Eric Andreasen – USAMU Coach for the FWRR Team (who just completed his tour of duty as CO of the USAMU) commented that they see a lot of Junior Teams when they run matches with the USAMU, but it has been a long time since the USAMU staff has seen a group as polite, respectful, courteous and attentive as our FWRR Juniors.

Congratulations to our FWRR Juniors and to all of the Indiana Junior High Power shooters!