Plinky

The August 2008 ‘American Rifleman’ has a brief article about Plinky Topperwein under the heading of ‘100 Years Ago.’ The feat written up in the article is Mrs. Adolph Topperwein (Plinky) breaking 961 out of 1000 clay pigeons in 4 hours and 35 minutes on July 18, 1908. Consider the numbers: she broke 96 out of the first 100 in 20 minutes, and 98 out of her last 100 in 16 minutes. She missed only 15 out of the first 500, and the sun was in her eyes! She and her husband were both incredibly good shots, and while reading this article, I remembered that Ernie Pyle once visited the Topperweins and preserved the precious meeting in writing for us. Here it is from 'Home Country'. “They called him Ad, which was short for Adolph. They called her Plinky, because when she was learning to shoot she’d keep saying, “Throw up another one and I’ll plink it.” Ad and Plinky Topperwein of San Antonio were one of the greatest shooting teams in the world. A gun-toter in the old Southwest wouldn’t have stood a show if he’d had to draw against Ad Topperwein. Yet Topperwein had never been called upon to defend his life with a gun. The nearest approach was many years ago when an escaped lunatic tried to get in the house. And on him Ad used a club! Ad, the son of a gunsmith of German descent, was born a few miles north of San Antonio. He started shooting when he was six. He would be seventy on his next birthday, and apparently he was shooting as well as ever. He and Plinky had a farm outside of town where they went to shoot whenever they could. Their son Lawrence was telling me about his father’s pulling off a series of difficult shots out there. And about Plinky’s saying, “Isn’t he wonderful? I don’t see how the old fool does it.” Which I suspect was slightly rhetorical because, if there was anything Plinky Topperwein loved more than shooting, it was her husband. She almost got tears in her eyes when she talked about him. They’d been married nearly forty years and earning their living together all that time by fancy shooting, and she still adored him. Topperwein was also an artist. His first paying job was as a chalk etcher on one of the San Antonio newspapers. Even now drawing was his hobby and an outlet for some of his nervous energy. He always carried crayons in the breast pocket of his coat, and he sketched on trains and in restaurants whenever he felt like it. His drawings could be found on windows, walls, doors, and mirrors all over the Southwest; the owners were proud of them. His favorite subjects were Indian and cowboy heads and comic-strip characters. Lawrence was even better at it than his father. He too had worked for years as a newspaper artist. But now he was reporter, and he loved the newspaper business. Incidentally, he couldn’t hit the Municipal Auditorium at twenty paces. When he was young, Ad Topperwein traveled with a circus doing trick shooting. The Winchester Arms Company heard of his prowess and hired him to go about the country giving sharp-shooting exhibitions. That had been thirty-nine years ago and he was still at it, for the same company. On one of his early visits to the Winchester plant in New Haven, Connecticut, he met a girl and married her. Things were pretty tough for her at first. She either had to stay home or else go on those exhibition trips and just twiddle her thumbs. She didn’t like it. So she made Ad teach her so shoot. It wasn’t long before she was as good a shot as her husband. And then Winchester hired her too. For twenty-nine years the world’s greatest shooting couple traveled the North American continent together. But always, the home they came back to betweentimes was San Antonio. Six years ago the Winchester people, probably for economy, had dropped Mrs. Topperwein. It almost broke her heart. Left at home, Plinky turned to other things for recreation, for she was a large woman with tremendous energy. She started bowling, and joined four bowling clubs. She was so interested that for a year she hardly shot at all. Then one day her husband, somewhat critically, said he felt she’d been bowling too much and had forgotten how to shoot. You have to know how intense was their pride in shooting to realize what sting that remark carried for Plinky. To them, their guns were human, and their marksmanship was an emotional thing. To neglect it was like neglecting your family. So they drove out to the farm. Plinky was not only hurt but scared stiff too. Maybe I have forgotten how to shoot, she thought. Maybe I have been bowling too much. If Ad was right, she was as disgraced in his eyes, and in her own too, as if she had struck their child. They got out there, and Ad started tossing targets into the air. One by one, Plinky picked them off. Her old confidence came back, and she called for more and more difficult shots. Before they were through, she had gone through their entire old routine without missing a shot. There was never a happier woman. Friends told me you could start an argument anywhere in San Antonio by saying that Ad was a better shot than Plinky, or vice versa. But the Topperweins said there wasn’t any argument; Plinky was better at some kinds of shooting, Ad was better at others. I spent a fascinating evening with the Topperweins. It was just luck that I caught Ad at home, for he was on the road most of the time. If he liked you, he’d talk guns all night. And Plinky was emotional—loved everything almost to heartbreak. We sat for hours in their den, which was a remarkable, helter-skelter, gun-infested room. There were guns everywhere—in cabinets, hung on the walls, standing in corners. And from under the couch Ad would pull suitcase after suitcase, each one full of six-shooters; there must have been scores of them. He took special ones out and fondled them, always looking to see if they were loaded. He said he had found cartridges many times in guns that he absolutely knew were not loaded. And that brings up what was, to me, the most amazing thing about this couple’s long career as professional crack shots. In forty years of almost daily shooting, they had never had any kind of accident. Never a split barrel, never a stray shot hitting anybody, never any kind of accident at all. I asked about the wild west custom of “fanning” a gun, and Ad showed me how fast he could do it. Fanning means knocking the hammer back with the back of your hand, instead of pulling the trigger. He admitted you could fire faster that way, but he said there wasn’t any advantage in it; when you hit the hammer it threw the gun out of line. “You might fire three times while the other fellow was firing once,” he said, “But your shots would be wild, and the other fellow would kill you with one good shot.” One day Plinky started out the front door, and there was a rattler coiled on the porch with its head up. It may have escaped from the reptile museum a block away. Anyway, its head went off with one blast from her six-gun. Next day she heard her neighbor screaming. She grabbed a rifle and ran over. The rattler’s mate also went to heaven via the Plinky route. Ad and Plinky held some remarkable records. In 1907 Ad shot steadily eight hours a day, for ten days in a row. He was firing a .22 rifle at 2 ½ - inch wooden blocks tossed into the air. He shot at 72,500 blocks, and missed only nine. Out of the first 50,000 he missed four. He had a number of runs of more than 10,000 without a miss, and one run of 14,540. But the strain of it, day after day, almost drove him insane. His muscles and nerves were in painful knots. At night he had horrible dreams: the blocks would be a mile away; the bullets wouldn’t come out of the end of the gun. As for Plinky, her trapshooting record of 1,952 hits out of 2,000 targets was a world’s record for anyone, man or woman. She shot for five hours straight, using a pump gun. It raised such a blister that a few days later the skin came off the whole palm of her hand. Neither of the Topperweins drank, but Ad smoked cigars and Plinky smoked cigarettes. She wondered why some of the cigarette companies didn’t ask her for a testimonial, since smoking hadn’t hurt her nerves. “Now, you don’t want any stuff like that,” Ad said. When I started to go, they refused to let me call a taxi, and drove me downtown. They said the next time we were in San Antonio we had to come out for dinner or get shot. All right, I’d come. But not because I was scared. I figured they’ve never shot at anything as thin as I am, standing edgewise.” From: Chapter XXV. Texas; Home Country by Ernie Pyle, William Sloane Associates, Inc. Publishers, New York, 1947