Back in the good old days, perhaps around ten years ago, you could walk around any gun show in America and have your pick of Remington 870 Wingmasters for around $100. This never really made any sense to me considering both this classic shotgun’s intended position in the market as well as all the verbiage bandied around by the manufacturer since its inception over six decades ago.
“The standard by which all pump shotguns are measured.”
“[T]he most aesthetically refined representative of our prestigious pump-action family.”
The Express models were a popular pickup as well at the time, but that made even less sense to me considering the level of fit and finish that accompanied the Wingmaster. This is all such basic gun-guy stuff that even my idiot eighteen-year-old self knew all of this at the time.
This wasn’t my first gun. That dubious honor belongs to the absolutely atrocious garbage rod I picked up at the same gun show a few months earlier. The Wingmaster was, however, my first real gun.
A majorly bubba’d example of its type. Stripped of bluing and wood and refinished with some OD-kote finish of one kind or another. Whatever the shortest legal barrel is with a tacti-cool breacher device pinned and welded in place. Cheap plastic stocks replaced the walnut. When you’re eighteen and concerned about being viewed as tactical, I guess it was just what the doctor ordered.
We’d take it out to shoot at cans or whatever other trash we could find, but I never really used it for anything… until I started bird hunting. I ordered a 27″ Rem-Choke barrel for it in beautiful blue and slapped it on the ugly cerakoted reciever. It was an odd juxtaposition, morphing from an object of imagined utility to one of the purest utility.
All go and no show.
I ran this gun exclusively for my first four seasons as a hunter, exploring the vast weirdness of southern Nevada and its capricious gamebirds — the Gambel’s quail and the chukar partridge. My first duck hunts, too. Perhaps a hunt that the Wingmaster is still better suited for compared to mountaineering up a limestone face after those red-legged devil birds.
It’s funny — a nice Wingmaster should be a point of pride for any enthusiast, but with the bastardizations visited upon it by Carroll County Bubba, it always took a bit of self-effacement to pull that thing out of the gun case amidst the fine Franchis and AYAs and Benellis. Not for any actual reason. Just the weird self-consciousness that comes from social media feeds of glossy fineguns and influencers competing for Online Trendy Bird Hunter of the Year that wouldn’t be caught dead without a doublegun of one design or another.
We killed some birds together, but that’s probably the least important part of the whole deal. We got dirty together. We left our tire tracks in places we had never been. We ate Western shit for the first time together, and both survived the falls. Doors opened for us, and other ones closed.
It was an important hunting partner at an important time.
Truthfully, she doesn’t leave the safe much these days. Sometimes as a back up for a more serious kind of hunting trip, other times as a gun for whomever doesn’t have one for whatever reason. She just lives in the safe most of the time as other, older, more interesting things enjoy their time in the sun and feathers.
Most of the time, I don’t think about her anymore. Not out of disinterest or any emotion more negative than that… just out of the sheer volume of everything else that goes on.
It’s a shame in a way or two. She never jammed or malfunctioned on me once, especially not during a hard-fought covey rise. Any missed shots were operator error. She quietly chugged on for years and years without a cleaning or so much as a second thought given to her… and this is how I’ve repaid my faithful servant.
When I do think about her, I think about having her stripped and re-blued and sourcing some beautiful wood for it to replace all of the scuffed-up plastic. Would that make it a Ship of Theseus? Is the time I’ve spent with it the way that it is and the time that I’ve burned into that steel more valuable or desirable than making it aesthetically right?
I don’t have any kids and I’m not sure if I ever will. If I end up with more than one, I anticipate and expect that there will be fisticuffs immediately after the last shovelful of dirt covers up my coffin; the subject being, of course, how Dad’s guns will be divvied up. Much like Guy Clark’s “Randall Knife,” I have to imagine they’ll want the ones I’ve haunted the most. The ones I’ve carried in the field and the ones that have tasted blood both human and animal. The ones I grew up on and the ones that shaped who I became as the old man they knew.
This humble, demure old Wingmaster will have my ghost in it one day for sure.
