GUNS Magazine October 1956

other with checkered ivory grips in his
pocket, are always loaded and on him con-
stantly. He had them that night in the
Waterbury tavern. Both Marsh and Sefried
were feeling pretty good.
"I asked the bartender feller if anybody
lived upstairsMarsh confided to me, "and
he said, 'Nobody at all.' So I just pulled
my .45 when somebody dared me to, and
pumped five or six shots at the ceiling right
quick. I slid the other .45 down the bar
to Harry. He caught it, just as slick as a
snake lashing out, and he put a few shots
up there, too. Why, do you know, that
bartender made me get up there and auto-
graph them bullet holes. Later on he painted
his ceiling and he put a little frame around
those shots . . ."
Marsh played while he was in New Haven,
but he worked, too. Finally he sold his big
city house and moved back to his 4,000-
acre farm outside of Fayetteville. There in
the old frame workshop which he built as a
boy, on a milling machine Remington
shipped to him in a crate nearly as big as
the shop, he is now working on new designs.
With the drowsy hum of insects in the
hot July afternoon breaking the stillness,
Williams showed me around his workshop.
He handed me the Ml Carbine marked
with the ball-pen autographs of General
Mark Clark and War Secretary Henry L.
Stimson, his prized "collector's item." From
an old trunk he unwrapped Serial-number 2
Colt Service Ace automatic, the second gun
made commercially with his designs in it.
Racked about the 20-foot square cabin were
rifles and shotguns, machine guns and pistols.
All were loaded.
From the window Marsh let me shoot his
latest modification of the .22 machine gun.
The tiny belt zipped through the receiver
as the little gun sputtered. He put it on
"slow fire" and it ran at 1,000 rounds a
minute. Then he changed the buffer and
stepped up the rate of fire to 2,000. As the
bolt jammed on a soft lead bullet, Marsh
apologized while he cleared the gun.
"We fired this little gun for 5,000 shots
at Aberdeen a couple of years ago. They
said it was the first gun they ever tested
which ran through without a jam or a mis-
fire of any kind. We used the copper-jack-
eted .22 military bullets. These soft lead
bullets just bent when the feed jerks them
across the bolt, they have to move so fast
to fire 2,000 times. That way they don't
go into the chamber right and it hangs up.
But with the metal bullets it works fine,"
he explained.
Today Williams says he is doing work
for both Winchester and Remington. And
both Winchester and Remington disclaim
knowledge of any such work. A lone-wolf
sort of mechanic, Marsh probably has some-
thing up his sleeve that will be as astonish-
ing when he springs it as his other designs
have been.
Meanwhile, he has several Model 50's
and is making little changes, checking new
ideas, making a good gun even better. And
today the Model 50 automatic in 12 and
20 gauge, in skeet and field models, is
rivalling the old reliable Model 12 pump
as a "wheel horse" of the Winchester line.
It has the curious distinction of being the
only recoil-operated autoloader with a fixed
barrel. It was impossible, they said, to make
such a gun. Q
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RM AD8006