Can you handle another M1 Carbine post?

Well tough, because I found another one.

This World War Two vet is another US Carbine, M1, and it was made by the Winchester corporation in either late 1942 or early 1943.

It also has the undated "W" stamped barrel that Winchester guns came from the factory with, so the barrel is likely original to the rifle.

Not import marked, and not refinished...as a matter of fact, even though the barrel still rates a "2" on the gauge, the rifle has a fair bit of wear on it, even for a 70-something year old fighting tool. It's almost as if it didn't quietly retire from service at the end of World War Two and/or Korea...and it didn't.

In the 1960's, the City of Detroit purchased a number of these carbines for their police department, one of only two big cities to do this. They issued them to their officers and the carbines rode the trunks of police cruisers and spent time in armory racks until 187 of carbines were finally sold for surplus to Zanders Sporting Goods for $75.00 each according to the stories. (This also apparently included some rare Irwin Pederson-produced guns...sigh.) They were then offered to the public and snapped up quickly. I missed out back then but I've been looking for one ever since and I finally came across one at a decent price...actually less than Zanders likely sold it for back then.

And how do I know it's one of those? Simple. DPD carbines have two distinctive markings that set them apart from the rest of the 6,000,000 or so carbines out there. The first is the DPD precinct and rack number stamped on the heel of the stock:

11th Precinct, rack #7. Back in the 1960's, the 11th was at E. Davison and Conant, so the gun is an east-sider. As an old west-sider when I lived in Detroit, I guess I can learn to overlook that though.

The rifle also bears a DPD inventory number on the side of the receiver, just barely visible at the wood line. Detroit assigned numbers sequentially to all of their firearms back then.

The number is 14444, which puts it right at the end of the bloc of the known inventory numbers for the city's carbines: 14267 to 14452.

So this is one of those Detroit guns. Can't say 100% but she probably pulled riot duty in 1967 in addition to whatever else it was used for. Heck, maybe it even crossed paths with my Detroit PD-issued Smith and Wesson Model 10. The city sold these off back in the 1990's too, for $15.00 each to another wholesaler.

Haven't had a chance to shoot this critter yet, but that time's coming and a range report will follow. Meanwhile, looks like come the leftist revolution, I'm ready to head back to re-take Detroit in style.

Has a round bolt. Only two of my carbines have round bolts. I wish this old gun could talk, because it's probably got some stories.

How Gun Laws are Really Enforced Against Criminals (Democrat edition)

In Detroit, home of all things Democrat, we have State Senator Virgil Smith finally getting his comeuppance....well sort of.

Smith, for those of you who don't recall, is the long-time Democrat politician from Detroit who, when confronted by his ex-wife regarding a naked woman that she found in his house when she stopped by shortly after the divorce, chose to beat her with his fists, chase her out of the house with an AR-15 rifle, fire several shots at her, and then fire several more into her brand new Mercedes.

Cop report: Naked Smith fought ex-wife before shooting

Felony city, right?

Ironically, Smith has been a solid anti-gun vote as long as he's been in Michigan politics, including past votes to deny citizens the right to carry concealed and own "assault rifles" like the AR-15 that he used to shoot at his ex-wife.

Well he got a sweetheart plea deal from the Wayne County Prosecutor's office, basically dropping almost every felony charge against him in return for a single count of Malicious Destruction of Property. Dismissed were the following felony charges:
1. Domestic Violence
2. Assault and Battery
3. Use of a Firearm in the Commission of a Felony.

All of those were much more serious than the piddling property crime, but hey--if you're a Dem politician in a Dem city and your father is a Dem judge, you're not going to get hammered even if you try to kill a woman. His sentence is merely that he gets ten months in jail, has to resign from the State Senate, and produce the rifle he used or fess up to where it is. That's right--he didn't even surrender the rifle to police that night. Nope. He hid it before they got there, and only now is the court ordering him to "surrender it or tell the court where it is".

Heck, had you or I fired a rifle at someone, the police would have busted right into our house to locate that rifle and destroyed the place looking for it. But in Smith's case, they just shrugged and left, apparently. Must be freaking nice.

And it's not like Smith had anything like a clean record. He had two prior DUI convictions, and should have had a third one--which would have been a felony in Michigan--but the case was conveniently screwed up and dismissed. Still, that arrest, even without conviction, could have and should have been taken into consideration before offering the plea and at sentencing. Apparently it was not. Because "bipolar" or something.

And the Democrats wonder why we don't want them passing more gun laws. Hell. They don't even enforce the ones on the books now...at least not when a fellow Democrat breaks them.

A trip down memory lane

While back up in Michigan, I took the dogs and my nephew, The Spud, downtown Detroit for a few hours.

This was my old apartment. Ground floor, just behind the white Jeep. In the early 1990s, I was paying $250 a month, utilities included, for this one bedroom apartment just off the Wayne State University campus.

For most of my stay there, I lived with a gal who was probably the hottest looking Harley Davidson mechanic that ever existed. I'm not sure how it happened, but I took her home from a bar one night and she stayed for five years. But she cooked food, did the laundry and kept the place spotless, so I just shrugged and accepted it until she got too crazy during my first year of law school.

This was the store I used to shop at every day. The owner, Les, used to love my dog, a Golden Retriever named Brandon. every day we'd go in together and he'd sit up and beg until Les gave him a pretzel sick out of the big jar on his counter. Then Les would fold my newspaper up and hand it to Brandon, who'd carry it home in his mouth. We did this daily for years.

Sorry guys. No pretzels. Les reportedly died years ago. Someone else runs the place now, and it's not even open today.

I used to swim Brandon in this pool. Now there's a sign up that says "No dogs". Coincidence?

Wayne State Student Union.

The Undergraduate Library that they were building when I left. They named it after Dean David Adamany?! Hey, Alumni Association? Don't call me asking for money no more. He was a tool when I was there.

The flag pole on Gullen Mall.

Twenty two years ago, I put a sticker on it protesting the city's mistreatment of police officers Larry Nevers and Walter Budzyn following the death of a crackhead named Malice Green who fought them when they tried to arrest him. That sticker was there for a long, long, time. Here it was in 2007, fourteen years after I stuck it there.














Back then, I held a rally on campus to raise support for these two officers. It drew a couple thousand attendees, including protesters who came by bus from as far away as Cleveland. And from that day forward, I could do no wrong as far as the campus police were concerned. And to be fair, I put them to the test a time or two. I was the lone conservative activist on campus during the both the Budzyn and Nevers days and the first Gulf War, and I was pretty quick to engage radical leftist groups when I found them. I got hauled off by the campus cops several times, but not once was I actually arrested. Instead, they usually drove me a couple of blocks away and then dropped me off and told me to go home for the day. I liked those guys.


The sticker is still there now, just recently painted over. Typical union painter work--they couldn't even be bothered to scrape or strip it off. It's still there under that paint. Maybe I'll go back with some paint thinner next time.

I took the dogs into the book store to buy camera batteries and a coffee mug. Don't know why Murphy is slouching but they were very well behaved.

Old Main, the original building that was once Wayne University.

I was a Teaching Assistant in the Geology Department there once. I got that job by having the third-highest grade of all Geology 101 students that semester. I got that grade by dating MY Teaching Assistant.


On Woodward, we have the world-renowned Detroit Institute of Arts. I used to have a membership there and I loved it's galleries. But alas, I got into a shouting match with a couple of their security guards one day over a piece of art that I might have touched. (It was a modern art sculpture that's supposed to move.) I quit going for a while over that. Much the pity now.

Right across the Street is the main branch of the Detroit Public Library. I used to check books and videos out here all the time. Man, you want to see an ornate and impressive building...It's a reminder of how much money the city used to have back before the Democrats took control and drove it into the ground.

Next door to that: the Detroit Historical Museum. Another great institution. Their exhibits are phenominal, especially a huge model train set that runs around much of the basement.

Here's the old 49 room Hecker Mansion on Woodward Ave. at Ferry. When I knew it, it was still owned by the Smiley Brothers Music Co., but the family let it go to seed and Detroiters, as is their wont, got in and vandalized and looted it pretty badly before a law firm bought it and renovated it again. Now Wayne State University owns it, having paid a reported $2.3 million for it.

Here's an abandoned building on West Lafayette Street that I remember well. It's the old Detroit Free Press building. My father worked there for many years. I worked there briefly in the early 1990s too.

I remember the sound of the huge three-story high presses in the basement, and the smell of hot lead plates and ink. But one day they stopped for good as a result of the costs of a protracted union strike and the building got quiet. The presses were hauled out and scrapped, and eventually the offices moved out, too. The paper still prints, but not here. They share press time with their former competitor, the Detroit News, whom they now operate in conjunction with under a Joint Operating Agreement.

I found an open door off the old loading dock behind the building. Had I not had Spud and the dogs with me, I'd have gone inside for one more look around.

The Rennaisannce Center, or Ren Cen. Built by Ford Motor Co. in 1976, it's now owned by General Motors.

The dogs are chilling in front of the fountain in Hart Plaza.

It looks much nicer in the summer when the water is on.

"Are we done here? We're done here."

Here's the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario. And we have freighter traffic upbound.

Good timing. We got to see the tug Ken Boothe Sr. and it's barge, Lakes Contender. Launched in 2012, this combo is the newest addition to the Great Lakes shipping fleet. The tug is 135 feet long and the barge is 740 feet. The tug has two 5,400HP diesels for a combined 10,500 shaft horsepower.

Impressive, but I miss the old self-unloaders and straight-deckers.

This was new to me. A memorial to the labor unions that wrecked Detroit, screwed up Michigan's economy, and damamged America's ability to compete in the modern world. It's festooned with quotes from such leftists as former mayor Coleman Young, Eugene Debs, and Saul Alinsky, among others. The Spud liked the design, but he knows not the harm that unions caused.

Here's the Spirit of Detroit statue, dressed up to commemorate Michigan State, which is off to the Cotton Bowl this year, having trounced both University of Michigan and Ohio State this year. It was a very good year.

The Spud and the hounds pose by the statue.


"In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed
In the "Maritime Sailors' Cathedral"
The church bell chimed 'til it rang twenty-nine times
For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald..."

These are the lyrics of the song by Gordon Lightfoot about to loss of that steel freighter on the night of November 10, 1975. (And yes, I remember that night too, and the reports the next morning about a ship, overdue and presumed lost on Lake Superior.) Well here's that cathedral, on Jefferson Ave. in the shadow of the Rennaisannce Center. They still hold a memorial service there every November. I went one year. It was incredibly solemn and moving. Officers and crew from many other lake ships were there, all in their dress uniforms.

I wanted to take pictures of all of the abandoned houses, but the demolishers have been busy. Mostly I found blocks and blocks of vacant land where burned-out houses used to be.

That includes this block, the 2300 block of West Warren Ave.

This was where the whole Malice Green mess went down back in 1992. For a long time, a vacant, gutted storefront had a memorial to that loser painted on the wall. It was the one small piece of Detroit that the local scumbags always kept clean and tidy. And they always repainted it, no matter how many times we some people threw paint on it.
















It's gone now, Walt and Larry. It's finally gone.










Alas, Walt and Larry are gone, too. They've both since died. And other than me, I suspect that few people remember and even fewer people care.

Flying, flying, part 2.

On departure from Detroit City Airport, Proud Hillbilly aboard, we saw this thousand-footer entering the Detroit River off Lake St. Clair.

She's the Presque Isle, built in 1973. We've seen her before, and she's actually a tug/barge combination, not a single ship. You can see that better in this shot:

Downbound fully loaded.

She's huge any way you measure her though, at 1000 feet long, 104 feet wide, and drawing a depth of 46 feet when loaded. She can haul 57,500 tons of iron ore, and her diesels put out 14,840 horsepower. We saw her on the river last September, too.

Here's Belle Isle, a long-neglected city park that became a haven for drinking, drugs and other crimes under Detroit City Council's watch.

Now the State of Michigan is running it and it's cleaning up nicely with Michigan State Police in charge. Of course the usual suspects are complaining about the State Police doing what the city police never did: enforcing the law and maintaining the order.
Downtown, and the Renaissance Center. Built by Ford Motor Co., and now owned by General Motors, courtesy of the US Taxpayers, who took quite a bath bailing GM out.

Here's the Ambassador Bridge linking Detroit to Windsor, Ontario. (That's in Canada, for you Obama voters.)

Here's a nice Canada/US memorial in Windsor.

Nice to know that they've apparently gotten over both the War of 1812 and the last few hockey seasons where US teams have shellacked theirs.

And back on the American side, we see a famous landmark to urban blight and decay, the old Michigan Central Station.

It was so beautiful once.

Continuing downriver, we spot the cement barge St. Mary's Cement II being pushed by her dedicated tug, the Sea Eagle II.

And here's another one of my favorites, the self-unloading steamship Mississagi.

She was originally launched in 1943 as the Hill Annex. She cost 2.2 million dollars back then. She spent much of her time sailing as the George A. Sloan and she was converted into a self-unloader in 1965/66.

We've seen her before, too. She still looks pretty raggedy, but she'll always be a Great Lakes classic. Long may she sail.

Here's the little tanker Algocanada heading upriver.

And here's the southern end of the river, with the shipping channel down the center clearly visible.

Flying along than channel--and staying well on the US side of the invisible line in the sky which is the international border--we can see some old sunken barges hidden back in the swampy center of the islet.

Tsk!

Coming off the river mouth, it was so clear that we could see the cooling tower of the Davis-Besse nuke plant on the Ohio side of the lake. That's seriously above-average visibility.
Here's Put-in-Bay on South Bass Island again. Much nicer conditions than the visit last week.

We came ashore just west of Vermillion, Ohio. Here's a nice little marina community with it's own channel and breakwater. If you love your boat, this'd be a cool place to live.

We went south of Cleveland and I'd planned a mid-flight landing at Beaver Valley Airport just to get out and stretch, but then I saw Barbour Airport, a neat little grass strip at Alliance, Ohio. Heck, why not just land there? So we did. I loves me some grass strips.

Glad we did, too. They were skydiving there. we stayed to watch a bit.

Taking off again, we flew north and west of Pittsburgh as the sun was setting.

Then it was about an hour over the mountains until we were coasting down for a right-traffic approach to my home field's Runway 26. The sixth landing of the day was practically perfect, and after putting my trusty Cessna to bed, we enjoyed a fine Thai dinner in town at a nice place that PH knows well. I got home 13 hours after I left, pacified two wild dogs, and racked out. It was a very good day, indeed.


Oh, and Proud Hillbilly has more pics on her page here, including some of a darn cute kid.