When I was about 14 I decided one day to reshape and refinish an old .22 that my family owned (that’s how I saw it, anyway). I sculpted the grip, inlayed a diamond of white wood in the bottom of the grip, cut off the tip of the forearm and replaced it with a piece of walnut. And of course I sanded it all down smooth, etc. My goal was to make it look a lot more like those stylish high-powered rifles that I drooled over in my catalogues. I was about ¾ of the way through this process when dad came home from work.
Dad was a pretty calm person most of the time. He even stayed reasonably calm that day. But I had never before seen him so upset or frustrated, nor have I seen him as upset since. In my mind I can still see him shaking and saying, “It was not yours to change. I’ve had that rifle since I was a kid. My brother and I got it as a gift for Christmas when we were teenagers.” That was followed by a very long pause as he looked at me, trying to decide what to say next, then finally he just repeated what he had said earlier, “It was not yours to change.”
As I’m sure you can imagine, it had a big impact on me. One thing I began to realize is that people value things for different reasons. I just saw a cheap rifle with cheap design, something to be improved, a canvas for my first foray into gun work. But for dad that rifle was a repository of memories.
The way I looked at old stuff and even old people and old culture began to change from that day. I began to realize that the traditional needed a closer look, and I’ve become more and more of a traditionalist over the decades since. I think that’s not an uncommon path. I think it’s not uncommon for guys who were once impressed with shiny and new and “perfect” to slowly migrate toward a preference for the traditional.
I think that the traditional Hawken rifles are for many people a lot like dad’s old rifle. They are a repository of memories. They aren’t individual memories, of course. They are cultural memories—memories that we share as a community, memories of our heroes, memories of an earlier period in our idea of the American experience. For a lot of us they are also no doubt related to a nostalgia we have for our youth and those impressionable years when we first encountered such grand things in the books and movies that described them.
So for many of us, it doesn’t really work to ask us to separate these things from our heroes and just ask how one might evaluate the design of wood and metal. For some of us, asking how we could improve a Hawken is kind of like asking us how we could improve our grandmothers. Some of our grandmothers may have been pretty. Others may have been a bit homely. But we don’t love our grandmother’s just because they were pretty. We love them because of what they represent to us. Even if they were a bit homely, we have no interest in changing them.
I don’t mean to suggest that design is of no significance. I just mean to put it in context. On a different thread someone commented that some people don’t know the difference between good design and mediocre or even bad design (my paraphrase). I’ve met people like that, too, so I agree with the observation, at least in a limited way. But I think it’s important to also recognize that an informed preference for the traditional is not the same thing as naiveté or ignorance. There are many on here who do know the difference, and yet they prefer the traditional, even with its details that others may consider flaws.
