Hubley Cap Gun

by Mike Pitzer, 2019

If we weren’t looking for pop bottles, we were probably playing Cowboys and Indians. This was my Hubley cap pistol. I must have had it from the time I was 6 until I was 8. I remember my Dad taking it away because a bunch of us kids discovered that you could take a whole roll of caps and smash ‘em with a hammer on the cement and it would sound like an M80 going off! We also cracked the cement sidewalk. None of the Dads seemed happy about that.

As I worked on this piece and shared it on Facebook, something interesting happened, the people who had had a cap gun growing up knew instantly that it was a toy. Those who hadn’t had one as a child started a conversation about, “Why would I draw a pistol?”, “Too many people are being killed by handguns!” and so on. My wife Lynn was one of those people who felt it really wasn’t “Happy Art” and she’d asked me why didn’t add “caps” when I was drawing it? It never occurred to me that people wouldn’t see it as a toy — so I added caps to the drawing and instantly everyone saw it as a toy. The funny thing was that a couple people came up to me and said they could actually smell the sulfur when they looked at the drawing. Maybe, I should do a scratch and sniff show?

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