"Red Nichols? Never heard of him" UPDATED - final

Those words were first written by a young woman who asked around the Lawman Leather shop, assuming that my missive to her father's company was from some no-account 'captive' gun writer for the industry press; an enthusiast who din't kno 'nothin'. I had mentioned I was the producer of "Holstory -- Gunleather of the Twentieth Century. Not good enough! It seemed. Never heard of you :-)

Which puts me in mind of this terrific scene from "Some Like It Hot", a 1959 film I saw as a child when it was released -- but not knowing it was a comedy! A shock when Toothpick Charlie and his mates were machine-gunned by Spats' men as in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Afterwards, Chicago's police chief is seen 'conversing' with rum runner Spats about Charlie's demise:

"Toothpick Charlie? Never heard of 'im". Some Like it Hot's chief of detectives denies his informant was Toothpick Charlie. Charlie pays the price in .45 caliber courtesy of several Thompson subs (still shown here because WIX is not displaying the video on main page).

I've not ever thought of myself as a gun writer, or indeed any kind of writer, until I compiled all my gun press appearances. Just over one hundred* published pages is not too shabby, and doesn't count all the book chapters (I wrote several of the "Blue Steel & Gunleather" chapters, and all of the "Holstory" chapters, too) or my hundreds of educational posts in forums such as smith-wessonforum.com as 'rednichols' and ditto coltforum.com , same name. Nor a hundred multi-page, illustrated blog posts.

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Below, in roughly date order from the early 1980s, in mags like Shooting Times, Handgun Quarterly, Combat Handguns, and Handguns. *Yeah, there m/b duplicates if/when I lost track during updates of this blog post :-).

Below, the editors were NOT HAPPY with the first draft of my article about the many pistols being pitted against each other for the Army's new 9mm tests. I had used evidence including photos that had been provided on background by the Army, showing cracks in the S&W frames. I was told the mag would lose all of Smith's advertising if they included them. Turned out they were right to fear a free press in the face of S&W because years later, when the same editors for the same mag wrote about common-sense gun regulations, Smith demanded they be fired or else the company would pull its advertising! And they WERE.

Gun mag articles are NOT reporting, they are 'PUBLICITY to attract and satisfy advertisers; you don't think your paltry subscriptions pay all the bills, do you? Instead, all magazines (and radio stations) are founded to sell advertising and the editorial is secondary to that financial goal.

Lawman Leather of Texas: NEVER HEARD OF THEM:

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Lawman Leather? Never heard of 'em. But below, from that company's 'good friend' Jerry Ahern (because he wrote a puff piece about their only holster model) shows he had at least a faint recollection of who Red Nichols was/is:

To read more about it all in my book titled "Holstory -- Gunleather of the Twentieth Century

-- the Second Edition", click on the new link at top of page.