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Tedmon occasionally indulged in a genre of writing that has fallen out of favor since the 1950s, but once enjoyed widespread popularity: the largely fictional comic yarn. “Them Awful Boys,” in the Dec. 1925 Outdoor Life, “Mystery Lead,” in the Dec. 1944 The American Rifleman , and “Precocious Pellets,” in the Dec. 1946 The American Rifleman , are characteristic examples. Modern readers are apt to find these tales rather more tedious than entertaining, but they serve to illustrate something perhaps unexpected about the personality of Tedmon: far from being the humorless moralist which the occasionally scalding vehemence of his tirades might suggest, a broad sense of country-boy humor percolated through much of his work, particularly that of the ‘20s and ‘30s. Refined wit it wasn’t, but rather the kind of good-natured cornpone that made Hee-Haw a hit TV show in the ‘70s. He also occasionally ventured into fiction, as two known examples in Ace-High magazine attest.

Whether because he believed he had said enough, or because his editors thought so, Tedmon wrote less about small deer and sporting ethics in the years after WWII. In five pieces published between 1945 and 1952, he promoted a new (or rather, revitalized) interest – offhand, free-rifle competition, a modern derivative of the Schuetzen matches that had captivated him as a youth but had since died out due to anti-”German” sentiment. The last published work of his known to this collector was, most fittingly, a return to a “favorite” >subject, “The Stevens Favorite Rifle,” in 1959. He permanently left the range on November 28, 1969, at 85 years of age, and now lies among other family members in Grandview Cemetery of Ft. Collins.

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