Don’t you just hate it when this happens? Grumpy (They wanted this guy gone and they now have an excuse….)
Juggler, magician, speed painter, violinist, equestrian, animal trainer, acrobat, and marksman, Sylvester Schäffer Jr. thrilled audiences around the world.
Not all famous exhibition shooters came from America, and not all of them performed in Wild West traveling shows. In fact, Europe has a rich history of sharpshooters who performed stage shows in music halls and vaudeville theaters. Sylvester Schäffer Jr. was one of the greatest.
Born in Vienna, Austria, on January 22, 1885, Sylvester started training when he was just three years old. His father was a famous juggler and entertainer, and his uncle was, too. Sylvester was doing more than just following in their footsteps, and by age four he was a violin virtuoso. Not long thereafter, he showed talent in painting as well as in all types of athletics. He was so naturally adept that at the age of nine, he was considered a prodigy. Soon thereafter he became skilled in juggling, horsemanship, dog training, and sharpshooting.
Before he was 20 years old, he was a vaudeville sensation. Eventually, his show was so large and involved so many attendants that it required four wagons to transport his accessories and accoutrements. He even had a marching band in his act that traveled with him.
At the height of his career, Sylvester was one of the highest-paid entertainers in vaudeville. A newspaper article published after his death reported that at one point, he was earning 25,000 Gold Marks a month.
He performed throughout Europe and in the United States prior to World War I, and his act included manipulating coins, performing card tricks, catching cannon balls on his neck, conjuring magic tricks, balancing a Roman chariot on his chin, creating oil paintings in three minutes, and soothing “savage” beasts on the stage. He also played violin solos and performed daring horseback tricks.
I was unable to find any detailed accounts of his shooting feats, but vaudeville trick-shooting typically involved shooting objects, such as cigarettes and playing cards, held by an assistant in their mouth or hand; extinguishing the flame of a candle; and shooting glass balls or wooden blocks suspended in the air or tossed into the air, sometimes hitting the same block more than once before it hit the stage.
Sometimes a brass ball was attached to an assistant’s head, and the assistant walked in a circle around the shooter at a steady pace so the shooter could make multiple hits on a moving target.
Other shooting acts included shooting from various positions, with the shooter lying on his back, or bent down, or with the gun upside down or turned to one side or positioned between the shooter’s legs. Often, the shooter would use a mirror to eye a target and shoot behind his back, with the gun over his shoulder; the target was often an apple or potato rested on the assistant’s head.
One review of Schäffer’s “one-man three-ring circus” mentioned that he was especially good at “sharpshooting from a running board.” Another article said that it was not so much what kinds of acts he performed but how he did them.
Referring to Schäffer’s consummate skill, regal bearing and breeding, and almost too-modest stage demeanor, James H. Dougherty wrote, “It’s not so much the things he does but the inimitable way in which he accomplishes them…. He has rightly been called ‘Vaudeville’s Superman.’” Another review called him “the most talented man in the world.”
Schäffer had been living in New York between 1914 and 1917, but when the United States entered World War I, he was prohibited from performing shows and living in New York because of his German heritage. In fact, he was required to reside in the state of Montana, where he met many Native Americans. He enthusiastically learned and adapted to many of their traditions.
After World War I, he returned to the artistic life, touring Europe and starring in more than 25 movies. In 1939, along with his wife and son, Schäffer moved to the U.S. and resided in Hollywood. He died on June 20, 1949, in Los Angeles. He was 64 years old.
Hands down, the whitetail is the most popular big-game animal in North America.
Many years ago, Outdoor Life did a study to determine the relationship between the illustration on the cover and newsstand sales. Among big-game animals, the covers that sold the most were those with pictures of magnificent white-tailed deer.
This is further evidence, if any is needed, that the whitetail is the most popular big-game animal in North America—so far ahead it’s not even close. Writers, including me, like to venture far afield and return home to write about exotic species like Cape buffalo, Alaska brown bears, and desert bighorns, but the stories that readers dig the most, no matter the time of year, are those about whitetails.
Jack O’Connor was even guiltier of this than me, but up against the implacable findings of that Outdoor Life study, for every piece he wrote about hunting Persian red sheep in the Vale of Kashmir (I made that up. I’ve always wanted to mention the Vale of Kashmir in a story. There are no Persian red sheep there.) Anyway, for every one of those, O’Connor reckoned he wrote five articles about whitetails.
O’Connor grew up near Tucson, so whitetails were the first big game he hunted, and it’s my firm belief that like your first love, you never forget your first hunt. And remarkably often, when you’re growing old and getting on, when you’ve hunted a lot of things in a lot of places, and you’ve run out of wall space, many of us go back to hunting what we did when we were kids and, surprisingly often, using much the same rifles we used back then.
This is a mix of many things—nostalgia, an attempt to reclaim youth, a visit to old familiar places. For me, hunting whitetails—it doesn’t matter where—is a chance to feel once again the excitement I felt when I was 16 and stepped out of the cabin that first time, into the snow, and set off in the hopes of seeing a deer. For the record, I was wearing a red-checked Mackinaw and carrying a Marlin 336 in .35 Remington. I still have the Mackinaw.
This was in southern Ontario, during an era that history records as the whitetail’s low point in population. For the first few years, even seeing a track in the snow was an event. But I kept hunting them, and gradually the deer bounced back. I finally took a buck in Ontario 27 years after I got my first deer tag, and that is a long time to go without.
By the time I got that buck, I’d hunted several whitetails in other places, as well as caribou in Quebec, an Alaska brown bear, a Dall sheep in the Chugach, and Cape buffalo in both Tanzania and Botswana, among other things. In those days, I kept count of animals downed, mostly for journalistic reasons, but the number was nearing 50 by the time that modest eight-pointer breathed his last. In those days, I always kept the deer hides, tanned with the hair on, because I could not bear to waste any part. That became cumbersome after a while, and I gave most of them away, but I still have the skin of that Ontario whitetail. I may have it buried with me.
There is a definite magic to the first game you hunted—and not necessarily to the first game you drop—simply because being allowed to go hunting with a real rifle is a milestone more important than your first driver’s license.
Another great thing about being in love with whitetails, no matter where you end up in your life, is that there are probably some to be found not far away. You can hunt whitetails until you die, and just being out there hunting them, that’s what counts.
By the way, according to the Outdoor Life study, the second-most popular cover animal was a tie between the elk and the grizzly bear.
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A “Pimp your Garand”
Now I could see adding some checkering on a regular Garand stock & maybe the Monte Carlo cheek rest. Seeing that I can always use all the help I can get while shooting but this is way beyond the Pale.
Coments ? Grumpy
& I am okay, So here is something to amuse you !Grumpy.gif)
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