A Late Tribute to An Early Mentor

Paul Moss was a cousin, but throughout our growing up years he was more like a brother. He lived in the country; my family had moved to town. I managed to spend as much time in the country as I could, either at my grandparents house or at Paul’s house. We did typical country boy activities together: rode horses, hunted and rambled, which was what our parents called the time we spent exploring all the forest and fields thereabout. Guns were always involved, but Paul somehow had knowledge about them that was far deeper than mine. For example, we hunted squirrels, quail, dove, rabbits and deer. While my hunting shotgun was Model 12 Winchester that had been my father’s, Paul owned a Franchi automatic. I used slugs in my shotgun to hunt deer, but Paul had a Winchester 94 lever action rifle.

He taught me to reload shotgun shells, which I did briefly somewhere around the 5th or 6th grades. The reading material in the Moss’s family bathroom was the Shooter’s Bible. When I was reading Hot Rod and Car Craft Magazines Paul most have been reading gun magazines.

I mostly carried my dad’s Model 10 S&W .38 Special revolver, but Paul managed one cotton harvest season to acquire a Ruger Blackhawk in .41 Magnum. I wasn’t with him the day a took a whitetail buck with that Ruger. He was going through a barbed wire fence with his rifle on the ground for safety, when he heard rustling in a nearby bush. A startled buck ran out of the brush. As he ran away, Paul pulled the .41 from its holster and shot the buck in the back of the head.

Paul was drafted after high school. In Vietnam he was assigned as a door gunner on a C Model Huey gunship. He wrote me one letter in which he told me if I came to Vietnam, I should do it as Warrant Officer aviator to fly a helicopter. That’s exactly what happened. What’s interesting about that is when we were young boys we flew my dad’s Chevy station wagon on many make believe missions. In those sessions I was always the pilot, sitting on the driver’s side, while Paul sat near the other door as the crewman, who frequently manned guns or rockets or bombs.

Life took us in different directions and I’m the one who actually wound up in the gun business and for a season a gun store owner. Paul was a policeman for a while and later a fireman, but much of his life was spent managing farms for absentee owners. We both did a season in the horse business. He bought and sold them while I trained show horses. Paul’s knowledge of cattle breeds and hay varieties was impressive. When Paul was alive I used to call him when one of my grandsons and I came across questions about cattle when driving back from one of our trips to or from a country gun range we frequent.

Paul died quietly in his sleep four years ago. I’m glad for him he’s in heaven (no question about it), but sort of mad at him for not letting me know he was going do I could say a proper goodbye. He went the way most of us would like to go, quietly in his sleep. Thank you Paul for teaching me to enjoy the outdoors and for making gun carrying safe and normal.