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Had the family never been uprooted, his father’s gift of a rifle and his initial exploits as a hunter could of course have taken place as easily in Colorado as in the Greater New York metropolitan area. The experience that would have been difficult to replicate elsewhere, however, was Allyn’s exposure to organized shooting activity, especially schuetzen-style competition, of an intensity probably unmatched anywhere in the country. “A worker in my father’s office” who was himself a schuetzen competitor seems to have been largely responsible for introducing Allyn, as a spectator only, to this demanding discipline. Curiously, references to his own father as a shooting mentor, beyond providing the hardware, are conspicuously absent from his later writings: a pointed contrast to Allyn’s intense involvement in coaching his own two sons.

“I well remember as a boy of 16 or 17... the old Greenville Schuetzen Range,” he wrote in “Those Stevens Rifles,” where “my brother and I met Dr. Hudson and numerous other noted target shooters of the time.” Likewise recalled with pleasure were “visions of the old Zettler Brother’s Gallery.” Born into the kind of rural culture which accepted guns as everyday objects of utility and sport, his exposure to the sophisticated world of schuetzen competition revealed a scientific dimension to riflery that a lifetime of shooting back on the ranch would have been unlikely to reveal. His “shooting consciousness” had been permanently enlarged.