Probably the best Christmas present I ever received was a
pair of Fanner 50s, complete with genuine leather holsters:
I was around 10 years old and a typical American boy with a fixation on violence, particularly the black-and-white wild-west violence that was prevalent on the three TV networks of the time – The Roy Rogers Show, The Gene Autry Show, The Cisco Kid, Have Gun Will Travel, Rawhide, Cheyenne, The Rifleman, Maverick, Tombstone Territory, The Lone Ranger, Colt .45, Death Valley Days, Lawman, Wyatt Earp, The Virginian, Wichita Town, Gunsmoke, The Rebel (there were more). I have a picture of me, age 5, shoveling snow, wearing a coonskin cap from the Davey Crockett Show (“Killed him a bear when he was only three”). The Fanner 50 was the must-have weapon for 10-year-olds in the late 1950s, a cap gun marketed by Mattel through Disney. If you had a Fanner 50 – or better yet, like me, a pair of Fanner 50s – you couldn’t be out-dueled at the OK Corral in the vacant lot next to our house on Fairmount Avenue. The big selling point of the Fanner (and why it was named Fanner) was the wide flair on the hammer. Instead of having to pull the trigger, wasting precious time wasting the bad guys, you could just whip the Fanner 50 out of its holster with one hand and “fan” the hammer – quickly pulling it back with the palm of your other hand, making it a proto-semi-automatic cap gun. Deadly.
I was around 10 years old and a typical American boy with a fixation on violence, particularly the black-and-white wild-west violence that was prevalent on the three TV networks of the time – The Roy Rogers Show, The Gene Autry Show, The Cisco Kid, Have Gun Will Travel, Rawhide, Cheyenne, The Rifleman, Maverick, Tombstone Territory, The Lone Ranger, Colt .45, Death Valley Days, Lawman, Wyatt Earp, The Virginian, Wichita Town, Gunsmoke, The Rebel (there were more). I have a picture of me, age 5, shoveling snow, wearing a coonskin cap from the Davey Crockett Show (“Killed him a bear when he was only three”). The Fanner 50 was the must-have weapon for 10-year-olds in the late 1950s, a cap gun marketed by Mattel through Disney. If you had a Fanner 50 – or better yet, like me, a pair of Fanner 50s – you couldn’t be out-dueled at the OK Corral in the vacant lot next to our house on Fairmount Avenue. The big selling point of the Fanner (and why it was named Fanner) was the wide flair on the hammer. Instead of having to pull the trigger, wasting precious time wasting the bad guys, you could just whip the Fanner 50 out of its holster with one hand and “fan” the hammer – quickly pulling it back with the palm of your other hand, making it a proto-semi-automatic cap gun. Deadly.
Granted my playing gunfights with my Fanner 50s was not on a
par with the violence of Mortal Kombat or Grand
Theft Auto that kids today get to play. But it’s what we had, all we
had back then. I blew away many of my playmates, and many more imaginary foes, falling
before me in the mirror of our living room, the cap smoke floating from the
barrel of my gun. I’m not sure what the effects of all this violence in my
youth had upon me. I’ve never actually killed anyone in my adult life, though.
And beyond some drug use and traffic violations, I’ve never broken the law. But
there are times when those Fanner 50s still make their way into my dreams.
