Remembering A Legendary Lawman/Gunwriter, Part 1
By John Taffin
They used to dominate the gun writing field but they are mostly all gone now. When I went to my first NRA show more than 40 years ago there they were. I was more interested in them than I was the products on display. This was better than being at the Academy Awards. I’m talking about characters—real honest-to-goodness characters. As I walked the aisles it seemed they were everywhere. Not only did I meet them but most of them also became friends over the years.
I’m talking about the likes of Rex Applegate, Charles Askins, Jimmy Clark, Dean Grennell, Bill Jordan, Elmer Keith, John Lachuk, Bob Milek, George Nonte, Skeeter Skelton, Hal Swiggett, John Wootters … I was privileged to visit some of them in their homes, as well as have some of them visit me. It was a wonderful Technicolor world, but like most of the rest of the world, everything has changed. The world has become too much plain-vanilla and today I can count the characters remaining on the fingers of one hand.
As a budding sixgunner the man from the list I identified with the most, the one whose articles I looked for every month, was Charles A. Skelton, who soon became affectionately known as Skeeter. He basically began his writing career right here with this magazine in the late 1950’s. At the time he was Sheriff of Deaf Smith County, Texas. Skeeter was on the Amarillo Police Department in 1950 when he met the love of his life, Sally. He also served on the Border Patrol and as a Federal Agent. When I read his first article in GUNS I was hooked on Skeeter for life.
I first met him at the NRA show when I looked up and saw this fellow walking towards me in a nice blue suit, tie, and light-colored Stetson. I knew immediately it was him. I walked up to him, said hello introducing myself, and handed him a picture. He grabbed me by the arm and said: “Son, let’s go somewhere quiet where we can talk.” And talk we did. The picture I showed him was of the barrel of a sixgun. Not just any sixgun, but a Colt Single Action. And on the barrel it said: “Russian & S&W Special .44” and I had found the way to his sixgunning heart.
Thanks to the urgings of Skeeter Skelton, S&W brought back the Model 24 and
Model 624 .44 Special in the early 1980’s.
I was just a teenager when I discovered Skeeter in these pages. I’ve saved all of his articles, but even if I hadn’t I would still remember them. Such articles as “Pistols For Plainclothesmen” in which he extolled the virtues of pocket pistols. Eventually I had a Smith & Wesson Chiefs Special .38 dehorned and slicked up just like his. I lusted over his nickel-plated Detective Special with ivory stocks and shortly thereafter came up with a nickel-plated Colt Cobra .38 Special, however, money was too short at the time to have ivory stocks made. I still want to do this someday. Someday.
He covered the bigger sixguns with “Belt Guns On The Rio Grande” and one of my favorite pictures of Skeeter is with his holstered .44 Magnum. “These Are The New Varminters” dealt with long-range shooting of .357 Magnum and .44 Magnum sixguns. One of those he featured was a Ruger 7-1/2-inch .357 Flat-Top Blackhawk. Ruger never made such an animal and he had cut down a 10-inch Flat-Top Blackhawk to come up with this handier sixgun. (No one knew at the time how rare the 10 inchers would become!) He also wrote of his Ruger 7-1/2-inch .44 Magnum Flat-Top Blackhawk, how he found it for a good price in a gun shop and made his own grips to fit his hand. I sent my original Ruger .44 Magnum Flat-Top Blackhawk back to Ruger to be re-barreled to 7-1/2 inches. Just as with the 10’s .357, the 7-1/2-inch .44 Magnum Flat-Top was very rare.very
Skeeter also liked .44 Specials. When the .44 Magnum arrived he sold his .44 Special S&W and began carrying a 4-inch .44 Magnum. It did not take him long to realize the Magnum was too much for peace officer duties and he went back to the 4-inch .44 Special. He didn’t abandon the .44 Magnum but instead used it for hunting which is exactly what most of us did. He wrote of the .44 Special Colt Single Action which I had used as the key to his heart. At a time when .44 Specials were virtually impossible to find, he talked of finding a Colt Single Action for $125 and having it re-barreled and re-cylindered to .44 Special. When the New Frontier .44 Special came along, he had a 5-1/2-inch version with carved ivory grips by Jerry Evans and this was one of his “special Specials.”
Skeeter was a big fan of the .357 Magnum, especially the 5-inch S&W. With the coming of the K-Framed .357 Magnum, Skeeter found it much easier to carry all day, however the original .357 Magnum became his outdoor gun. He wrote of how hard it was to find his first 5-inch .357 Magnum at a time when even if I could find one I couldn’t afford it. One of his most memorable articles was the one dealing with the K-22 and how he had lusted over a picture of Gary Cooper in Life magazine on a cougar hunt with his K-22. Skeeter lusted over sixguns then and so did I.
Skeeter was also a fan of the .45 Colt in the Colt Single Action, the Colt New Frontier and the S&W Model 25. He shared his favorite loads for us for the .38 Special, .357 Magnum, .44 Special and .45 Colt. Every Skeeter fan knows his favorite loads. For the .357 Magnum he mostly used .38 Special brass with Ray Thompson’s 358156 gas check bullet seated in the bottom crimping groove over 13.5 grains of 2400. This load is a little milder than Elmer Keith’s and a lot easier on both sixguns and sixgunners. Skeeter did not load his .44 Specials heavy and everyone knows what the Skeeter .44 Special Load was and is. Remember, Skeeter carried his .44 Special in his peace officer duties and as such he used the Keith 429421 bullet over 7.5 grains of Unique. This load is about 900 fps and did everything he needed it to do. It didn’t take me long to agree with him and most of my .44 Special loads over the past four decades has been the Skeeter Load. I got it from him and he got it from Elmer Keith.
Two of Skeeter’s favorite sixguns were the .44 Special Colt New Frontier
5-1/2-inch and the .357 Magnum S&W 5-inch.
Just a few very special Ruger 3-screw Flat-Top .44 Specials were made soon after
Skeeter’s passing. This is John’s and its serial number is S.S.4.
When both Colt and S&W dropped all .44 Specials in the late 1960’s/early 1970’s, Skeeter looked for a solution. He took a pair of .357 Magnum sixguns to his gunsmith and in probably the most influential article he ever wrote, told how to turn them into .44 Specials. Both of these were Perfect Packin’ Pistols with a 4-inch barrel on the S&W and a 4-5/8-inch barrel on the Ruger. This article appeared 40 years ago and I wonder how many Ruger .357 Magnum Blackhawks have been converted to .44 Special over the years?
Today, several gunsmiths still do these and Ruger, thanks to Lipsey’s, finally offers the .44 Special chambered in the mid-framed New Model Blackhawk. I have examples in both blue and stainless. They are excellent shooters and I think of Skeeter every time I shoot one of these or one of the many conversions I’ve had done. My most used load still remains the Skeeter .44 Special Load.
Skeeter is directly responsible for getting both Colt and S&W to bring back the .44 Special in the late 1970’s. Colt offered the .44 Special in both the 3rd Generation Single Action Army and the Colt New Frontier and S&W followed with the Model 24 and stainless steel Model 624 in .44 Special. Unfortunately, all of these sixguns are now gone, however both Ruger and Freedom Arms offer .44 Special single-action sixguns today.
Skeeter passed in 1988 and shortly thereafter John Wootters sent me a letter informing me of a special sixgun being built for Skeeter while he was in the hospital in Houston. “Many years ago, Skeeter and I shared a hunting trip in northern British Columbia, during which we jointly discovered the skeleton of a mature Stone ram, probably killed in an avalanche. We slipped the horns, and Skeeter took one and I the other… I’ve been saving them for the ‘right gun’ for 15 years. This is the right gun. The so-called ‘Little Ruger’ in .44 Special was the favorite type of sporting pistol and cartridge of my late buddy, Skeeter Skelton, who spent much of his terminal illness in a hospital here in Houston… Sadly, Skeeter had to fold his hand before the last raise, and the project never went further until recently.”
This special sixgun was finished after Skeeter passed and I first saw it with John Wootters on the Y.O. Ranch when we were hunting together. Wootters went on: “The little .44 is a sweetheart, quiet and pleasant to shoot, accurate (naturally, in that chambering), light as a feather, and pretty as a yellow cactus blossom. It leaps to the hand of its own will, and seeks a target with the eagerness of a pointer pup. I will cherish it ’til the day I die… Having been struck by the similarity of our taste I thought you might like to hear about S.S.1.”
Bill Grover worked with Bob Baer and John Wootters on S.S.1 and then later built six more Skeeter Skelton Specials to remember Skeeter. Mine is S.S.4 and now wears 1-piece ivory stocks. It carries memories of three good friends now gone, Skeeter, Bill Grover and John Wootters.