Dry Firing Through the Kitchen

The Anderson farmhouse around the time the Anderson children, Gary and Karen, were born.

Gary's childhood was spent in a typical Nebraska farmland house, standing on 160 acres of family land.   Two of the three bedrooms upstairs had no heat;  on a cold, wintry night frost would accumulate on the inside of the single-pane windows.    Gary and his sister Karen had the unheated bedrooms upstairs.  The heat for the lower floors came from the furnace in the crawl space through a large grate on the floor, measuring about 3' by 3'.   It was half in the kitchen and half in the living room.  Electricity was added by the Rural Electrification Act in 1948 when Gary was 9 years old and indoor plumbing was added when Gary was 15 years old.  During the hot summer months, Gary would sleep outdoors every night.

There was a large "mudroom/laundryroom" where Gary and his dad would reload.   This was a relatively warm room because of a space heater on the north wall.   Gary's sister remembers taking a bath in a round galvanized bathtub in this room before the house had electricity to heat water.  On the east wall there was a white metal medicine cabinet that became a storage place for Gary's meager ammunition supply.     On adhesive tape, he wrote "Warning AMMO" and stuck it on the medicine cabinet.     It stayed there for 40 years.

Gary spent hours dry firing by standing, kneeling, or lying in a corner of the living room and dry firing diagonally through the kitchen into the back room.      His sister, Karen, remembers this as a "pain the the neck" sometimes.     Every apartment we have rented or house we have purchased must have the required 10 meters (even if at a diagonal) for dry firing.    When Gary was in seminary, the couple living next to us (Dick and Evelyn Headen) knew us a long time before they realized Gary was dry firing just behind our common wall.

The farmhouse laundry room will become a significant story for my blog the day Gary won his second Gold Medal.