Post by jaypee on Jul 19, 2017 9:21:18 GMT -5
I have an old friend that kept me out of trouble a bunch of times and I'd like to bring her out of the closet and show her off. "She" is a Smith and Wesson Model 19-2 Combat Magnum in caliber .357 Magnum that I purchased at the California Highway Patrol Academy from the George F. Cake Company of San Francisco in April of 1965. I paid a whopping $88 for it, brand spanking new.
The gun has a standard trigger and wide target hammer, sometimes called the “whale tail” hammer. Some of our qualification courses still required some long range single-action shooting at the time, so the wider hammer seemed like a good idea.
The front sight is not original – the original sight on the six-inch Model 19 was an undercut target sight that had a nasty habit of hanging up on the lip of our old “suicide bucket” holsters and causing unintended discharges - if the officer was silly enough to have his finger on the trigger during the draw. The six inch barrel mandated by the Department slowed down the draw enough without the target sight, so we took our guns to the Smith and Wesson distributor in Monrovia for a sight change. He replaced it with the ramp sight normally used on the four-inch model - to which he had added a custom yellow insert. It’s the sight you see in the photograph, and it became very popular among CHP types in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles in the early 1970's..
I was wearing this revolver one night in January of 1966 when I went down on my CHP motor on the Santa Ana Freeway. I went down on my right side, thoroughly grinding off the right grip and gouging up the backstrap right nicely. But no structural damage was done, so I replaced the grips, had her checked out by a gunsmith, and the old girl soldiered on bravely for several more years.
Along about 1970, after the Newhall Incident resulted in four of our officers being killed in the same fire fight, the Department finally authorized the use of speed loaders. However, the loaders usually wouldn’t work with stock factory target grips unless you milled out the top of the left grip. Thus the obviously home spun mill job. The factory didn't begin providing milled grips for a couple of more years.
By 1971 I had fired a gazillion rounds of magnum ammo in it, which was unusually hard on Model 19’s, so fearing It might break down at a bad moment I replaced it with a brand new one just like it. In 1972 my brand new wife adopted it as her own, named it “Maggie,” learned to shoot it very well, and hasn’t let it out of her sight since then. She won’t let me reblue the gun. She calls all of the bright shiny steel on the sides of the barrel and cylinder “character lines” and cherishes them. She has long since mastered the semiauto, but “Maggie” still comes out and plays once in a while and maintains a place of honor in the gun safe and in my last will and testament.
They stopped making the Model 19 a few years ago and the Smith and Wesson line just doesn't seem the same without it, given the number of times it bailed me out of trouble. It was a really sweet revolver.
JayPee
The gun has a standard trigger and wide target hammer, sometimes called the “whale tail” hammer. Some of our qualification courses still required some long range single-action shooting at the time, so the wider hammer seemed like a good idea.
The front sight is not original – the original sight on the six-inch Model 19 was an undercut target sight that had a nasty habit of hanging up on the lip of our old “suicide bucket” holsters and causing unintended discharges - if the officer was silly enough to have his finger on the trigger during the draw. The six inch barrel mandated by the Department slowed down the draw enough without the target sight, so we took our guns to the Smith and Wesson distributor in Monrovia for a sight change. He replaced it with the ramp sight normally used on the four-inch model - to which he had added a custom yellow insert. It’s the sight you see in the photograph, and it became very popular among CHP types in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles in the early 1970's..
I was wearing this revolver one night in January of 1966 when I went down on my CHP motor on the Santa Ana Freeway. I went down on my right side, thoroughly grinding off the right grip and gouging up the backstrap right nicely. But no structural damage was done, so I replaced the grips, had her checked out by a gunsmith, and the old girl soldiered on bravely for several more years.
Along about 1970, after the Newhall Incident resulted in four of our officers being killed in the same fire fight, the Department finally authorized the use of speed loaders. However, the loaders usually wouldn’t work with stock factory target grips unless you milled out the top of the left grip. Thus the obviously home spun mill job. The factory didn't begin providing milled grips for a couple of more years.
By 1971 I had fired a gazillion rounds of magnum ammo in it, which was unusually hard on Model 19’s, so fearing It might break down at a bad moment I replaced it with a brand new one just like it. In 1972 my brand new wife adopted it as her own, named it “Maggie,” learned to shoot it very well, and hasn’t let it out of her sight since then. She won’t let me reblue the gun. She calls all of the bright shiny steel on the sides of the barrel and cylinder “character lines” and cherishes them. She has long since mastered the semiauto, but “Maggie” still comes out and plays once in a while and maintains a place of honor in the gun safe and in my last will and testament.
They stopped making the Model 19 a few years ago and the Smith and Wesson line just doesn't seem the same without it, given the number of times it bailed me out of trouble. It was a really sweet revolver.
JayPee