Word: skeet
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Dates: during 1933-1933
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William Harnden Foster, editor of National Sportsman and Hunting and Fishing, claims credit for inventing skeet, in 1925. But as early as 1910 the late C. E. Davies and other Ballard Vale, Mass, gunners, Editor Foster among them, had hit on its basic idea. Ordinary trapshooting, with the gunner firing always from the same position, seemed too static to them. They wanted something more like real hunting. On the grounds of the Glen Rock Kennels they traced a great circle, set up a trap outside it, then moved around the circle potting the flying targets from all angles...
...tell the world about it-chiefly because he wanted to boom the arms & ammunition business, get more advertising into his magazines. In February 1926 he launched a nation-wide promotional campaign, offered $100 for a name. The money went to a Montana rancher's wife who suggested "skeet," an obsolete word, probably Scandinavian, meaning "to shoot...
There are now more than 800 skeet clubs with some 20,000 male & female skeeters in the U. S. and nine other countries. Twenty-six state associations in the U. S. are governed by a National Skeet Shooting Association, Inc. which publishes a monthly Skeet Shooting News (circulation, 1,500) patterned vaguely after TIME. Many U. S. sporting magazines carry a skeet department. Enthusiasts estimate 18,000,000 shotgun shells burned at skeet last year. Twenty-six state and some 20 intersectional shoots culminate yearly in the Great Eastern States and National Telegraphic Championships staged by the Remington Gun Club...
...Skeet tries to duplicate the typical hunting situation of pointing dog, tense gunner, unpredictable game birds. Unlike trap-shooters, skeeters may not raise gun to shoulder until the target appears. That may be any time within three seconds after the shooter cries "Pull." Skeeter Henry Bourne Joy, onetime president of Packard Motor Car Co., has invented an electric variable timer which throws targets with unbiased irregularity...
Famed among skeet shooters are Louis D. Bolton of Detroit, who holds the world's long run record of 224 consecutive breaks (made with a 20-gauge gun) ; Ed Sransky of New Jersey, who broke the first straight 25 with a .410 bore (smallest) shotgun; the Waltham (Mass.) Gun Club, which holds the world's team record of 486 breaks out of 500 targets. Some famed skeet enthusiasts: President Alvan-Macauley of Packard Motor Car Co., Publisher Orson Desaix Munn of Scientific American, Major-General Hanson Edward Ely, Financier James Alexander Stillman, Brigadier-General William Mitchell, Bernt Balchen...