Ft. Meade, Maryland, was my birthplace, and I was born right in the window of time that made me a candidate for the West Point Class of 1969. My father had served in North Africa and Italy during World War II, and he was stationed at Ft. Meade shortly after returning home from the European Theater. Then I came along, in the fall of 1947.
Our family left Ft. Meade before I was a full year old, and I didn’t return to live there until this year, 2025. My wife and I made the move from a scenic mountain home in rural Virginia to Frederick, Maryland in order to be close to our younger son and his family.
The beauty of our Virginia home was tough to leave, but being close to our son’s family was much more important.
However, one aspect of the move gave me pause: I had a modest pistol collection, and the laws in Maryland required owners of pistols to follow various procedures that left me worried that I might miss some step and get in trouble.
My worries go back to my PCS (permanent change of station—a “move” of the family) in 1988 from Frankfurt, Germany to the Defense Intelligence Agency in Washington, D.C. I had taken my three most valuable (to me) pistols with me to Germany—one that my father had captured in WWII*, one that my aunt had carried with her as a Red Cross worker in England during WWII**, and one, a beautifully engraved Colt .45 caliber automatic, that a great uncle had sold to my father***. As the .45 automatic was my service sidearm throughout my 21-year Army career, that pistol was particularly dear to me. All three were very special to me, and that’s why I took them with me to Germany instead of storing them somewhere in the States during my three-year tour of duty in Frankfurt.
The U.S. Army contracts with commercial moving firms for moving a family’s household goods from one station to another, and sometimes the contractors are not the best. Damage was to be expected, theft was not unusual, and there was a saying in those days: “Three moves equals one fire.” As I prepared to move back to the States in 1988, I pondered the risk of having my pistols stolen, and I decided to take them with me in my luggage. The procedures for taking weapons in luggage on airlines are strict, but I followed them and had no difficulty. However, customs at Dulles Airport was different. I was in uniform and with my family, and I had two official firearm forms listing the weapons, but the customs agent confiscated all three pistols because I was missing a form that the customs agent said was required. My protests were useless. The customs agent informed me how I might get the pistols back by visiting a certain office in D.C.
Fortunately, since my new duty station was D.C., visiting the office was not greatly inconvenient. When I went to the office, on an upper floor in one of the big federal buildings in the city — after phone calls, etc. — I encountered a polite civilian who opened a safe and gave me my pistols. He commented, “They should not have taken these from you.” Small comfort.
So, maybe I’m “gun shy,” but I never want to encounter something like that again.
As we finalized our move to Maryland in March, I pondered how to find a new home for my pistols. My children don’t want them, so I arranged for a cousin to take my collection. He’s a generation younger than I, and he very much appreciates the firearms, which range from a rare homemade Civil War pistol to the service sidearm standard in the Army in the early 2000’s.
We members of the Class of 1969 chose “the profession of arms.” None of us is perfect, and our civilian masters aren’t perfect. We have to do the best we can but make allowances for the inevitable imperfections and move on. My way to deal with my pistol collection, and the possibility that I might inadvertently violate Maryland’s laws, was to give away the collection. It’s still “in the family,” and it’s in the hands of the next generation. I’m comfortable with that.
*My father “captured” the pistol when his field hospital occupied a hospital in Italy, where the retreating Axis forces had left not only patients (who were then cared for by my father’s unit) but a significant quantity of military supplies. At the time, my father was the Headquarters Company commander of the field hospital. The .25 caliber Beretta was the standard sidearm of certain Italian officers; this particular pistol was brand new, still in cosmoline.
**My aunt served in the Red Cross, primarily in London, during WWII. Her Red Cross career extended well into the 1980’s and included a tour of duty in Vietnam. Her tour of duty there overlapped with my tour of duty with the 101st Airborne (Airmobile) Division. However, because of the distance between us (she was in the Saigon area, and I was at Camp Eagle, near Hue City) and the demands on both of us, we never got together in Vietnam.
***That great uncle was Robert C. Staley, a real old-time Texas lawman with several experiences through which he barely kept his life. This Colt .45 was the sidearm he used most during his three careers. Uncle Bob wrote the history of each of the guns he sold to my father, and here is a verbatim excerpt from his history of the Colt .45: “The right-hand walnut grip on this gun is inlaid with GI issue eagles, plus my initials RCS and USBP in ivory. In my younger, more foolish days, I once backed up to the piano in Mrs. Crosby’s saloon in Villa Acuña, Mexico and reaching back pried a couple ivory keys from it. Then I made the above inlays from one of them. At the time I did this the “USBP” of course meant United States Border Patrol. Later–years later, and purely by chance I entered the Prohibition Service and the inlay held good–United States Bureau Prohibition. Then, of all things, after the country went dry, and I was out of work, I took a job (until fired) with the U.S. Bureau of Prisons at La Tuna, Tex, north of El Paso, and again USBP was fully applicable. Funny how things happen isn’t it. It seems so damned unlikely that such a thing would occur–like it was “pre-destined.”
