BOARD a tunnel train under the Hudson river, and get off at the Exchange Place station in Jersey City. Then walk down Hudson street, perhaps the dirtiest and noisiest of all the dirty and noisy streets of Jersey City, until you reach Morris street, in the midst of a multitude of machine shops and foundries whose clangor and clamor is never stilled, and within sight and sound of the bellowing steamships that line the Jersey City docks and piers. Walk down Morris street to No. 18, a dingy and dilapidated old structure, and climb the stairs to the fifth floor. And there, while your ear-drums are assaulted by the screeching whine of a planing-mill on the same floor, you’ll see at the head of the stairs a sign:
POPE’S BELL
Bell out of Order. Knock on the Glass
You knock and knock , and when you knock again, trying vainly to compete with the planing-mill and the noises of machinery that come filtering up the steps. But finally the planing-mill subsides for an instant, you pound on the door with all your might and suddenly it is opened by an old man with very gray hair, a homemade cigarette drooping from his lips, a little black cap on the back of his head, and a twinkle in his bright gray eyes.
He is the Edison of the rifle-barrel. His name is Harry M. Pope, and he is hard to find.
Truly he is a prophet without honor in his own country. He is known wherever rifle experts gather and wherever fine rifles and fine ammunition are manufactured; but in his own home town the rank and file of the population—and the big business men, too—never heard of him. He has lived in New Jersey for almost fifteen years, and in all of that time his work-shop has been in 18 Morris street – but his name does not appear in the city directories, nor in the telephone directory, and the Chamber of Commerce of Jersey City has no record of him. The writer succeeded in finding him only because an ancient gunsmith on the outskirts of the city happened to remember his address.
The shop in which Mr. Pope manufactures fine rifle-barrels and does the delicate work of adjustment seems to an outsider to be cluttered with tools in hopeless confusion. But there really isn’t any confusion at all; he just hasn’t room for all his tools. Every nook and corner of the place is jammed with lathes and punches and dies and tools of all sorts—with the exception of a small space in a corner.
That space holds a rather dilapidated couch, with a faded blue neck tie thrown carelessly upon it, and a pair of heavy army shoes peeping from beneath it. This is where Mr. Pope does most of his sleeping—when it occurs to him to sleep. He doesn’t sleep a great deal; he thinks, with Edison, that it is a waste of time.
He eats regularly if he happens to think of it, otherwise only when he becomes so hungry that the matter of food intrudes itself. He has a home, of course, and a family, two of his boys were in the American Army during the war,—but he is so much in love with his work that he sleeps in his shop some four or five nights a week. “But I’m getting a little tired now,” he said, “what with all this noise and so much work. I’d like to be in the country for a while.” “Are you thinking of retiring?” “Retire!” exclaimed the wizard of the barrels indignantly. “I’ll retire when I’m dead! What 1 meant was that I’d like to have my shop in the country, where I could get a bit of fresh air.”
The postmarks on the great mass of letters piled on Mr. Pope’s work‘ bench demonstrate that, if without honor in his own country, he certainly has great honor in Canada and in California and Maine and all of the other states of the Union.
Mr. Pope has known and loved rifles all his life.
“I began shooting when I was a kid,” he said, “and I’ve been shooting ever since. I had a hard time finding a gun that would shoot like I wanted it to shoot, and like I knew it ought to shoot, so I went to work and made one. I liked the work so much that I kept at it.”
Manufacturing rifle-barrels is about everything that Mr. Pope does. Repair work is distasteful to him, and repair work on barrels is the only thing of that sort that he will do at all. His delight is to take a perfect action direct from the factory and fit that action with a barrel of his own making—and the combination is a gun that wins championship matches. He has made many rifles of that sort; for, after all, it is the barrel that determines whether a weapon is a rifle or merely a piece of junk in the form of a rifle, and some of the guns that he has made have been considered by experts the finest in the world, and all of them in the hands of marksmen have brought home record scores and medals galore. Many of these prizes and medals the visitor will find hung on nails in a corner of Mr. Pope’s workshop, because he can shoot about as well as he can make rifle-barrels, and has won many big rifle tournaments.
Mr. Pope is a native of New Hampshire, and possesses a little more than his rightful share of New England reticence. Like all true artists, he is modest. However, it was learned. by dint of persistent questioning, that he has been making rifle-barrels for more than thirty years. He has had shops in various New England towns, and once went to the Pacific coast. But he lost everything he had in the San Francisco earthquake, and then returned to the East and settled in Jersey City.
Even if he achieves that dream of a place in the country, he probably won’t see very much of it, because the most striking impression that one gets of Mr. Pope is that he will continue to work with his rifle-barrels for eighteen hours a day as long as he lives.