But this personal and financial calamity for his father proved to be a providential turning point in the life of Allyn, “gangling product of the West,” he called himself, setting the stage for his evolution into a shooting authority of national repute. Allyn was enrolled by his father in the college preparatory Dwight School of Manhattan, which suggests that his father’s losses, if crippling, were not ruinous. At Dwight, Allyn established a lifelong friendship with another student, Charles Hopkins, whose accounting and managerial skills eventually earned him the position of Treasurer of the J. Stevens Arms Co. This happy convergence of interests greatly facilitated Allyn’s research, decades later, into the history of the arms maker he came to esteem above all others. The first fruit of that research, and also the earliest detailed examination of the firm to appear in print, was “Those Stevens Rifles” in the Dec. 1926 issue of The American Rifleman, but several similar studies followed.
Like father, like son: two Stevens-equipped generations of Tedmons after a day’s hunting.
The germ of Allyn’s infatuation with Stevens, however, was implanted by his own father, whose Christmas gift in 1900 was “the first rifle I ever owned... a Stevens Ideal No. 44...to me, yet, the most beautiful Rifle ever produced in this country.” So emphatic a sentiment, expressed 20 years later and after much grown-up shooting experience, leaves no doubt as to the impression that “first rifle” made on 16-year-old Allyn.
The family apparently resided, at least seasonally, in northern New Jersey during some part of their “Eastern exile,” as a letter of Allyn’s published in the July, 1902, issue of Recreation identifies his address as Ridgefield, N. J. This brief response to another reader’s query, very likely his first appearance in print, further extols the “good work” of both the Model 44 and the .32 Long Rifle cartridge, which, he took pains to explain, was, unlike other rimfire ammunition, “inside lubricated” (i.e., the bullet’s grease grooves were inside the case). It also provides evidence that opportunities for the pursuit of “small deer” were relatively abundant.
Had the family never been uprooted, his father’s gift of a rifle and his initial exploits as a hunter could of course have taken place as easily in Colorado as in the Greater New York metropolitan area. The experience that would have been difficult to replicate elsewhere, however, was Allyn’s exposure to organized shooting activity, especially schuetzen-style competition, of an intensity probably unmatched anywhere in the country. “A worker in my father’s office” who was himself a schuetzen competitor seems to have been largely responsible for introducing Allyn, as a spectator only, to this demanding discipline. Curiously, references to his own father as a shooting mentor, beyond providing the hardware, are conspicuously absent from his later writings: a pointed contrast to Allyn’s intense involvement in coaching his own two sons.
“I well remember as a boy of 16 or 17... the old Greenville Schuetzen Range,” he wrote in “Those Stevens Rifles,” where “my brother and I met Dr. Hudson and numerous other noted target shooters of the time.” Likewise recalled with pleasure were “visions of the old Zettler Brother’s Gallery.” Born into the kind of rural culture which accepted guns as everyday objects of utility and sport, his exposure to the sophisticated world of schuetzen competition revealed a scientific dimension to riflery that a lifetime of shooting back on the ranch would have been unlikely to reveal. His “shooting consciousness” had been permanently enlarged.
HOME AGAIN
By 1904, Bolivar’s financial health had revived sufficiently to allow the family to return to Ft. Collins, where Bolivar, ever the entrepreneur, had purchased another real estate and insurance business. Having by this time graduated from Dwight, Allyn enrolled that same year in the Colorado Agricultural College of Ft. Collins and graduated in 1908 with a B. S. in Agricultural Science. His new degree was not the immediate passport to worldly success he probably envisaged, and because he evidently entertained no desire to join his father in business, he spent the next several years ranching with his brother in Wyoming – a meager living, but one enlivened with plenty of shooting. Once he remarked that, so as to reserve their beef for market, prairie-dog potpie (“the equal of any grey squirrel”) became a staple of their diet. By the mid-teens, however, he finally secured a position with the Wyoming Dept. of Agriculture in Big Horn and Washakie Counties, reportedly becoming that state’s first professional agricultural agent. Neither his professional position nor college education would have been deduced by readers of his early articles, however, as Allyn seemed to go out of his way to cultivate the impression that he was merely an ordinary cowpuncher.
Allyn played no part in WWI, owing, he once mentioned fleetingly, to a visual problem. This condition would account for his early interest in riflescopes – although for one suffering impaired vision, he reported many impressive accounts of good shooting on moving targets with aperture sights. (Ordinary open sights he derided as worthless.) Possibly the birth of Allyn’s first child, Allyn, Jr., in 1917 also had something to do with his escape from the trenches. Bolivar, Jr., followed in 1920, and both boys became “featured players” and frequent photographic subjects in their father’s articles of the ‘20s and ‘30s. Finally, in 1921, Allyn returned to Colorado to stay, having obtained the job of Arapaho County Agricultural Agent. He settled his family in the county seat of Littleton, a peaceful ranching community some ten miles south of Denver.
Although Allyn never brought up his career or professional duties in his own writing, “An Agricultural History of Littleton,” published by that city, paints a picture of an energetic young man full of ideas new to this community. As “the new agent from the college in Ft. Collins,” he “tried to persuade farmers that only through livestock could they succeed. This paid off...and in the 1920s Littleton was considered ‘The Pure-Bred Livestock Center of the West.’” The position of County Agent presumably meshed very nicely with the interests of a sportsman, for Allyn was probably a welcome guest at every farm and ranch within his district. The job, however, brought little financial satisfaction, if his complaints of penury were true. Discussing reloading in 1923, he remarked that he had done so for years without a powder scale, using only an Ideal powder measure, because “$10 is a lot of money to have sitting on a shelf, for me at least.” Though an early proponent of telescopic sights, he lamented in 1927 that he had been “without one for years simply because I couldn’t afford one.” A thoughtful reader is tempted to suspect such comments were actually references to his early post-college, prairie dog-eating years, not his late ‘20s circumstances, but even if true, it seems clear his college education never provided him with the financial means of his father, who lived until 1937.
HIGH-VELOCITY FEVER
That his special relationship with Stevens rifles culminated in his being anointed “Godfather of Stevens Rifles” in the May, 1940, The American Rifleman by J. V. K. Wager would have been surprising to readers of his earliest articles, because Allyn, like so many of his contemporaries in the ‘teens, had been bewitched by high-velocity and firepower. The spell, in his case, had been cast by a Model 99 Savage chambered for the sensational new .250-3000 cartridge. Having learned through C. E. Howard, a Colorado friend who collaborated with Charles Newton in designing small-bore, high-velocity cartridges such as Savage’s .22 High-Power, that the .250 was “in the works,” Allyn arranged to lay hands on one of