Show BROADWAY AND MAIN STREET Ine Ineptness with re equalizer in even found among gangsters by BILLY ROSE because I 1 sometimes tote around more than two iwo dollars and because my iny house has demonstrated a tendency to get burgled I 1 have a license to barry carry a revolver and sometimes do but I 1 certainly hope I 1 never get into a spot where I 1 have to use it because I 1 doubt whither whether I 1 could hit bit the back wall of a brewery if I 1 were 20 feet away avy and it because I 1 practiced plenty aplenty a theres a makeshift pistol range back of my house up at mt kisco and over ih the years I 1 guess ive used up enough a ammunition to 0 keep a small balkan war going but no matter ho how w carefully I 1 sight and squeeze the baby gun with tho the short nose ive never been ablo able to do much more to the bulls eye than glare at it and two will get you 20 that most of the dead eye dicks you read about a b 0 it t cant do much better the U S army evidently a agrees g r a e with me about tho the difficulty in handling this tricky bi bit of mechanism effect 1 4 X dively next time billy iose bos you see newsreel of the kids who are doing the fighting in korea look closely and see sea armed with rifles garalds and browning a automatics u to but about the only place see a six gun will bein be in the holster of 0 a two star general I 1 FIRST LEARNED that expert shooting with a revolver Is more bull than ban bullseye when I 1 moseyed moneyed I 1 down to ft WO worth rth 14 years ag ago 0 to 0 stags stage thai cotys centennial exposition one of the doos I 1 put on the last frontier was a 11 wild west show and the cast included the best est hoss hos hands in the business Gala hads in 10 gallon hati won prize money in every rodeo from Pend pendleton leion to madison square gard garden en naturally I 1 want 1 ed cd to include on an exhibition of pistol shooting and as a charter member of the zane grey club I 1 figured figu u that almost any one of my m bronco blisters could pop a clay pipe bips out of a girls mouth at 30 feet well I 1 floured wrong there was no one tn in the cast who could hit the pipe without taking aking the mouth with it andl and I 1 wound up having to td im port the national pistol champion a skinny kid from brooklyn who had ad lear learned neit marksmanship in a coney island shooting gallery this ineptness inept nest with damon R anyon used lacall to lo tall call the ibe equalizer it is even mors more common unions among gangi gangsters teri surf sure the hoodlums pis toted toled many a ti lizen but bul almost invariably tbt ae victim was in 0 motor car and the me ranga a couple of inches from the she nap napa ol of his neck whenever the abe cobbs corpse to 4 be figured to 10 be wort mors than a few feet fees away the h killers hillers used sawed off shotguns hoig uni with a threefoot three foot loo spread or tammy guw which produced a y tike a 4 garden hose hole A few e v years back an ex bootleg ger now vice president of a national whiskey company told me a story about al caponi which illustrates my point it seems al mas iwas tipped lipped off that one af pf of his bodyguards wis was playing bootsie with a rival gang so he threw a banquet for of his hired help and alter after the feed made some complimentary remarks about the double crosser and asked him to get up on the th e table and take a bow As the guest of honor was bowing the hoodlums reached for their rods and let him have it but when capone always the good bookkeeper count ed the bullet holes he found only 20 in the carcass of the trig germen had missed YEARS YE ARS AGO I 1 used to haunt the street shooting galleries gall eiles and got so handy with a 22 rifle that I 1 could knock the dancing celluloid ball off the stream of water five times out often of ten and I 1 was plenty cocky about my marksmanship until one day when I 1 went up to see ben hecht athis at his place in nyack lecht fed up tip with my big talk about small arms suggested ashoot it out with charlie lederer the screen writer who was was spending the weekend with him iva got nothing again ft lederer I 1 said mid modestly let la kho him 18 live va 0 the target large will trill be a tomato 0 can at 10 feet taid laid new baft anil and you anil and charlie can take turns with my 22 autom automatic wis pheoh we went out on the lawn and led ld berer sighting carefully hit bit the can two out cut of three times I 1 even nick it 10 last month while vacationing in hollywood I 1 lunched with hecht and reminded him of the debacle d which ended my career as a marks marki man 1 T I might as well have been shooting mooting blanks 11 1 I said 4 As a matter of fact grinned ben you were 11 |