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But this personal and financial calamity for his father proved to be a providential turning point in the life of Allyn, “gangling product of the West,” he called himself, setting the stage for his evolution into a shooting authority of national repute. Allyn was enrolled by his father in the college preparatory Dwight School of Manhattan, which suggests that his father’s losses, if crippling, were not ruinous. At Dwight, Allyn established a lifelong friendship with another student, Charles Hopkins, whose accounting and managerial skills eventually earned him the position of Treasurer of the J. Stevens Arms Co. This happy convergence of interests greatly facilitated Allyn’s research, decades later, into the history of the arms maker he came to esteem above all others. The first fruit of that research, and also the earliest detailed examination of the firm to appear in print, was “Those Stevens Rifles” in the Dec. 1926 issue of The American Rifleman, but several similar studies followed.