I first met him at Second Chance, in 1980. I went there with the three main guys who set up IPSC/Manitoba with me. On one of the first days -- maybe the first day -- my friend Ron happened to mention to me that he was going to shoot full-power loads (245 grain Lyman 429421 bullet and 22.0 grains of 2400) at the pins. I was telling him that he was insane, why not use our .44 Special load of the same bullet at around 1,000 fps like I was going to? We happened to be standing beside Ayoob. Ron countered that according to the rules, he could wear his "glove". This was a golf glove. Ron was a big guy, but we delighted in teasing him about "the glove". Michael Jackson and his glove weren't a thing yet in 1980, but anyone with a sense of humour can figure out how vicious we were about "the glove".
"That's right," said Massad. "He can." And then he introduced himself. We were awed. We read American Handgunner, we knew who he was. Suddenly, "the glove" was cool, at least for Second Chance.
A whole cow was BBQ'd everyday. Everyone, and I mean everyone, had a gun on. Most were loaded. There was a plethora of ranges. We all went and shot with John Farnum. He had a combat course set up with reactive targets, and he evaluated everyone who ran the course. He told me that I was one of the best shots he'd seen that day, but that I didn't use cover worth spit. "Work on that," he told me.
The first night (and every night for the week), at the BBQ, they played Dirty Harry on a big screen. The four of us were at a table, the beer was free and we had a lot of it and our steaks and spuds and Massad walked by. Ron and I called to him, and introduced him to our other two guys. And he sat down with us and had a beer! And we watched Dirty Harry.
The next day, was Ron's 5-pin event. It was also mine, and I was on the line two tables down from him. Ron was shooting his Model 29 and using "the glove" and I had at the last minute rejected the use of my Model 29 and elected to use my Nickle 1911 GM with the MMC Bar-Cross sights and the throat job done by Smokey Ill, gunsmith in the day for Ron Peterson's Guns in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
* I had just bought a couple of the new DEVEL 8-shot magazines for the 1911 the day before, and was itching to test them out. Yeah, they worked fine, but the Lyman 225 grain RN lead cast bullet and 7.0 grains of Unique weren't a fantastic pin-killing combination, and I ended up with a 5-string average out of the running. Ron's booming .44, however, caught the attention of the crowd and sent the pins into next week. After Ron's first run, Richard Davis himself announced on the PA system: "There's a guy from Canada down there on table 3 using a full-power Model 29 the way it's supposed to be used! Keep an eye on him!" I thought to myself, "damn, I'm glad he singled out Ron and not me. I don't need that kind of pressure". Ron's 5-string average was just high enough for him to end up in the prizes, and he got himself a Ginsu knife. Yeah, we teased him about that pretty mercilessly too.
Ron clears the table with his .44 (and "the glove") at 2nd Chance, 1980.
That night, it was steak and beer time in the tented pavillion once again. Dirty Harry was playing. Ayoob came and sat with us. We talked, laughed and drank. We talked about the PPC, which Ayoob was into at the time, and how shooting the PPC with a Model 29 was a different experience. We sure laughed about that. A flare gun fight started up between two drunks, shooting right across the pavillion where everyone was watching Dirty Harry, again. Richard Davis appeared out of nowhere and told the two drunks to go and shoot at each other outside, goddammit! He saw Massad, and came and sat with us! Oh, man, we revered Davis. We had all seen him shoot himself with his vest on just that day. We were in hog heaven!
I took this clip of Davis off the Internet. None of us carried video cameras in 1980.
We saw Massad several other times, and there was a big party near the end we went to. It was in a house in Central Lake. Everyone was there. Massad was there, he was at the door when we arrived and introduced us around. Doctor Vulcan was there, the guy that invented to revolving cannon. I remember being introduced to him. Davis was there. The place was full of cops from every State around Michigan. There were troopers, City cops, and everyone else. Everyone was armed. I remember peeing outside because I couldn't wait and having two uniforms suddenly standing on either side of me joining in. Weird. Leaving at the end, Ron backed into a Massachusetts State Police car and broke the passenger side headlight. I mean, we were all drunker than skunks. The cops came out -- we were surrounded by cops -- and they looked at the damage, and then went and got a big "Dangerous" sticker and stuck it onto the offending back fender of our pickup, got into their car, and drove off muttering out the window about "Crazy drunken Canadians....".
Ron, the day after....
I ran into Massad again at the Bianchi Cup in 1981, but Ken Kulach (Regina RAPS director) and I were walking and talking with Bill Jordan and Bob Poos (pronounce Pose) from SOF so we just shook hands and said hello and moved along our separate ways.
I wrote a blurb maybe 10 years ago about Second Chance on the Smith and Wesson forum, and Massad came right along and posted after me, saying he remembered the time and he remembered us, and "hello", and yes, "Second Chance was crazy!" I'm glad I lived in those times, there will
never be anything like them again.
Check the ads for Second Chance in American Handgunner for 1981, '82 and '83 and '84. Several times, the photos were either Ron from behind, shooting the pins, or one of the other guys I was with. Did Ayoob take those photos? Maybe. Strange that photos of two of our group that shot at different times were used in the ads.
* In 2011, I was contacted to travel to Mexico City to do a job for a State Department guy who really worked for a lettered agency. I was concerned -- because, you know, it's always about "me" -- that I was going to be bumped off for having seen too much or even just something I wasn't supposed to somewhere in my travels. At one point, he produced a bag of several guns and told me that I "might want to take one." There were several, mainly revolvers, and a Model 36 Chief's Special that looked like it had some years on it. I grabbed the snubby, checked that it wasn't loaded, and asked if I could try the action without actually snapping it. I double-action staged it to cylinder lock a few times, and commented that it was nice.
"I'll take this one, if that's okay." I told him. He nodded, and smiled. Then he told me that the action had been worked over for him back in the '70's at Ron Peterson Guns.
I looked at him, surprised, and asked: "By Smokey?" He looked shocked. (Shocked, I tell you!)
"How do you know about him?" he asked, obviously surprised. It was about this point that I suspected I wasn't going to be bumped off. Later on, he asked me why I picked a lowly Chief's Special out of so many other guns.
"Mainly because I'm already wearing the pocket holster for it," I replied. From the early Magnum Gang days up through until today, little threads in my life keep connecting and it's neat.
