The Small Halls bus tour this past weekend made a stop at my grandparent’s place just south of Creemore, the site of Jordan’s Pistol and Gun Club.
In my opinion, The Jordan Gun Club was created because Bill’s wife Katie got tired of having several men under her feet and in her kitchen for days on end. She may have casually mentioned to Bill how ‘those buildings‘ local people were getting from Base Borden would hold a group of men as well as her kitchen would. And the idea took seed and the project was born. The building arrived and the wood stove was installed. A gun club required a proper shooting range so the next project was assembling two gun abutments. Known as the “gun butts” or “gun banks” they were constructed of two stacks of railway ties spaced apart. The six-foot area in the middle of the two stacks was filled with sand. I don’t know the exact distance but would assume the gun butts were 75 and 100 yards from the gun club.
As kids we would venture down to the gun butts and use our pocket knives to pick out lead shot from the banks to see who could find the most mangled up piece of lead bullet. It always made me nervous being in the middle of a target practice area and we never spent very long a time there.
Bill and Kate were the founding members of the Jordan Gun Club, along with Kate’s brother Charlie Murray from Nottawa, and Mickey McNabb from Collingwood.
Now with all clubs, there is a social aspect. They included Sunday morning coffee meetings down at the Gun Club, Club Jackets, various fall turkey shoots and an annual banquet held at Avening Hall. Tickets to the Gun Club Supper were a project all of its own! Bill would type out about 10 tickets onto a single sheet of paper using a manual typewriter. Each one had a ticket number, the price, the date and location. Next, each single sheet of tickets was hand fed into a small thread-less electric sewing machine and Bill sewed in between each of the tickets.
The needle holes were used as perforations to separate out each ticket. As the club grew, this project became more time consuming.
One Sunday the Gun Club was hosting an area Turkey Shoot and Kate stopped by to restock the coffee cups.
Her brother Charlie was there and asked if she wanted to try out his new 12 gauge shotgun. Now Kate was 5-foot-nothing tall but a darn fine shot, and Charlie knew this full well.
Some men visiting from out of the area (the locals knew better) began making comments about letting the little lady go back to her kitchen and not bothering the men at their sport. Charlie promptly paid her entry fee into the next round.
The story has it that some men were left eating crow after the shoot-off as Katie drove off with the prize turkey.
Now Bill Jordan was a big man with a big heart and had a keen mind for business. He knew right from wrong and never strayed from it. He “walked the talk” and expected the same from his family.
While working at the Noisy River Telephone as a line repairman a winter storm with howling bitter winds descended on the area and due to those winds, the telephone lines were down.
Everyone hunkered down to wait out the storm because they knew when the calm came, the men would be out to fix the lines.
But in this case, Bill left his own young family that day in order to fix one telephone line in particular. He knew there was a deathly ill baby at a farmhouse down that line and they might need to call the doctor to come quickly. That is what “walking the talk” meant to Bill Jordan.
He had a wry sense of humour and a quiet chuckle. He had massive meat hooks for hands yet could fix the most intricate gun mechanism.
Bill was not afraid of heights and he was part of the volunteers that worked on the roof of the newly arrived Avening Hall building. Give back to your community. Walk the Talk. Recently on a trip back to Avening I was asked, “Would you happen to be Bill Jordan’s granddaughter?”
And with a grin, I give my usual answer “I sure am!”
He was our patriarch and on Oct. 4, 1978 (38 years ago this week) the Jordan family was devastated at his sudden death from a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm at the age of 70.
Kate and the family needed to downsize some of Bill’s gun collection and they needed to do it in a hurry as the FAC regulations came into play on Jan. 1, 1979.
Thus, in December the largest gun auction in Ontario (to that date) was held in our little town at the Creemore Legion.
The final chapter of the Jordan’s Pistol and Gun Club had been written.
And for the record, yes, the Jordan women continue to be fine shots!
A fun read Laurie. I was a pretty good shot at one time. Still have my membership card.