How Times Have Changed:
Reader Roger Baumgarten passed along to me some clips about the 1957 Far Rockaway (New York City) High School rifle team.
Change one is obvious from the preceding sentence. Change two: The team was called, for obvious reasons and apparently not facetiously, The Nimrods.
Special bonus: Odd, and likely ultimately not substantive, mental connection to Dire Straits' Tunnel of Love.
The first time I reported that I had contact with a NIMROD to my XO, he started giggling. It's an inside joke between us to this day.
To my mind, all of this stuff smacks of rednecks and juvenile old men.
(Oh, and the other Nimrods too.)
IF the word's "rockaway", then it should be capitalized Rockaway, home to these marksmen and a legendary amusement park.
I actually met a guy in Israel named Nimrod a few years back, he pronounced it Nim-road, but I'm not sure if that's the only correct pronunciation.
http://www.bowenclassicarms.com/NEW/RS09picture.htm
Not pretentious at all. There was a time when most people knew enough about the Bible to understand.
Directly to the east of Far Rockaway are some towns of Nassau County where, at that time, there was still allowed some hunting with shotguns.
As an aside, I would avoid using Lyricsfreak.com as a reference due to its disregard for apostrophes, making it appear as though the site is run by illiterates. One of the lines in "Tunnel of Love" is shown on that web site as the following:
The hunting clubs just have some meetings, run a gun saftey course, then go hunting for a weekend in the fall...
But she went to Stella Maris. Nice Catholic girl... sorry Tribesman. Class o' '58 though.
And what did poor Gruenwald do to lose his forename, and be forever memorialized with the Star Wars-like "Groenwoie"?
Odds are these fellows turned out pretty well. I spend time with a lot of smallbore competitors (have actually met a Watersmeet Nimrod!), and find them a jovial, highly-educated, well-adjusted lot, unlike golfers, for instance. And the juniors have GPA's that put to shame the participants of any other scholastic sport--including chess, which has been known to harbor a brilliant loser or two if the team needs it.
I just ran into the coach of the rifelry team at the store this morning and mentioned to him that it seemed that most of the rest of the world has given up on high school rifelry... He pointed out that while the policies for regular rifles are still on the books at our school, the school team, along with all the other teams in the state , has switched to air rifelry... The biathloners still shoot .22lr, and he still has a couple kids on his team that bring regular match rifles to practice because they compete outside of school sanctioned events, but the bulk of the action these days is air guns supplied by the schools...
- Josh