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RP

Hahaha. My boys love aroma therapy.

Yep burnt gun powder it is!

Hooked!

Still enjoying that aroma.

Yup, my favorite cologne is Hoppes #9. My wife doesn't care for it.

One of my favorite memories from childhood is a gunshop outside a small town on the banks of the Withlacoochie River in Florida. I walked in the door with my Step-Dad and the smells hit me, I was hooked. Leather, gun oil, the metal from his lathe, burnt powder... the owner did some work for my Step Father and I was tasked with picking up the Single Action 22 as Dad worked long hours during the week. (Yes, a 12 year old could do that back then.)

The smith eventually hired me to do donkey work around the shop a couple days a week. He paid me in 22 ammo for my single shot. I swept up, raked the leaves, swept the lot, and more importantly, sat quietly in the corner on a stool and watched and listened as he worked on the guns and as customers came and went. The job ended with the summer, but it was too late, it was the start of an addiction.

Was that gunshop in Dunellon?

Travlin wrote: ↑

Sat Jan 28, 2023 12:12 am

Was that gunshop in Dunellon?

It was in a small town called Inglis. This was back in the late 60s. When you went under the Single bridge and upriver, there was nothing upriver except a few small homes. No businesses all the way up to the dam. The gunshop was on the East Side of the road about a 1/2 mile south of the bridge. For about six or to a year, we lived at the Withlacoohee Fish Camp, which unless I'm mistaken, is now the Big Oaks River Resort. When we first started going there, my stepfather was living in a cabin at the place running an IBEW crew building power towers in the area, Coming back to Tampa on the weekends. I loved the area and came up there to live in the Fish Camp. The Big Concrete Dock was under construction at the time and the bar was a shack on the other side of the ramp with a shaky wooden dock. Then "Big John" dropped a new double wide beside the new dock and was open for business, and the old bar was the bait shop. I had a boat to run the river, Boy Scouts to go with, and we could hang out and shoot pool in the bar during the day. We'd run down river to the ocean and fish, or upriver to the dam and float back down and fish all night. I wrote an humorous article for a local paper about that summer years later that was in my top five.

Now it's a double span across the river and the place is all built up. Geez... it's only been Fifty Plus years. What nerve.

Oh, yeah. I had family in Dunellon, Gainesville, Tampa, Marianna, The Keys, Pcola... okay... all over Florida. I lived all over the state. Moved to VA in the early 70s...

Inglis is where the Cross State Barge Canal was supposed to end. It got cancelled before very much work was done on it. I have been over that bridge many times.

I don't think that canal was there when I lived there. I can't remember. I think we could take the river all the way to the dam when I was a kid.