Recently I came across my 1962 Horace Mann Junior Rifle Club card.  Each morning I would leave my home on Art Street, carrying my cased Winchester .22 rifle, walk though the Montezuma Elementary school yard and get on the bus near Ewing and Montezuma Road with Steve Morgan and Ed Furlow, who were also carrying cased rifles.  Arriving at Horace Mann, we would put our  rifles into a locker in the back of Mr. Tooze’s classroom.  After school we would pick up our rifles and go over to the Crawford ROTC indoor rifle range.  Afterwards I often walked the three miles back home carrying the rifle. The Rifle Club was a great experience.  I learned basic safe firearms handling and marksman, skills that served me well in the Army and for thirty years as a law enforcement ranger for the Department of the Interior.  How times have changed! Today I don’t think I would make it to the corner of Mesita and Art Street without a SWAT team converging on me — Michael Meyer ’68

Love it!!  Gary Keefer ’60 taught across the courtyard from me  at Hale Junior High School for a few years in the ‘70s.  I was teaching U S History and decided to bring in my Winchester 30-30 and show the kids that, despite John Wayne holding it like a toothpick, it was a pretty heavy weapon.  Gary saw me heading for my classroom and hollered out the window, “Discipline problems?" -- John Fry '62

Crawford had a girls rifle team — “The Firing Fillies” — sponsored by the ROTC.  I was a member and thoroughly enjoyed it. We had an indoor range at the school — Julia Burnham Little '64