From the age of 9 on, I grew up and lived just south of your home ground. Lumby. By the time we moved there, I had been carrying around a single shot Cooey Ranger, without a bit of finish left on it and the stock "slimmed down". The original sights were long gone and someone had filed a dovetail into the receiver and forced in a home made V notch rear sight. Same for the front sight blade.
At the time, I thought it was a dream, custom rifle. I picked rocks and weeds all summer to trade for that rifle.
You were lucky, the Salmon Arm club has always been very pro active, so have the Enderby and Armstrong clubs. Lumby had a club at the time, but I lived to far away to get to the meetings and their range was rudimentary at best. At that time, the range likely would have bored me. I had free run on several thousand acres, Starlings had a bounty on their feet and the ranchers and neighbors would give me a nickel apiece for the Richardson's Ground Squirrel tails, from their fields. The odd Coyote, unskinned would get me a buck. That was big money for a 10 year old in those days.
A couple of my friends had Mossberg 146B rifles to shoot. Usually belonged to their father. Those rifles made by Ranger look pretty crude and I couldn't come close to matching the accuracy, especially with the coarse, crude sights on my rifle.
I also had a paper route very quickly after moving to the area. Papers (Province) came in on the noon bus, so I had to deliver them right after school as well as Saturday, no Sunday edition, thank goodness. My first six months pay went to a brand new Mossberg 146B, with a tube feed and black, fold down fore end. Talk about a giant step up.
The next 22rf was a Cooey Model 64 semi auto, with those terrible plastic magazines. Those mags were awful, I had to replace one every year, until I finally relegated the rifle to the closet. When an after market pot metal replacement system was offered I installed one and things were better, but they wore out pretty quickly as well. I got rid of that rifle soon after.
The 64 isn't a bad rifle and the design was picked up by several different companies. Sadly, none of the properly addressed the magazine issue.
Yup, we had similar backgrounds, about 90 kliks apart, as the crow flies.
Many years later, I joined the Lumby club and started up a Junior program. Our budget was limited, so we picked up used Marlin single shots and Mossberg single shots. We also supplied the ammo. It just kept everything on an even footing. The girls, could follow instructions and always outshot the boys, unless they were sucking up to one of them.
One of our members had several Suhl 22 single shot rifles in his safe and donated them to our junior program. They were HEAVY. To heavy for the smaller shooters.
Still, even though they were capable of very decent accuracy, they didn't shoot that much better than the Mossbergs or Marlins.
