Alumni Book Review by John A. Hollister ’64

This special alumni book review highlights a serendipitous CRMS connection: John A. Hollister ’64 recently discovered Gun Barons: The Weapons that Transformed America and The Men Who Invented Them—and only after diving in did he realize its author, John Bainbridge Jr., is also a CRMS alumnus.

Probably most CRMS alumni are, on some level, bookworms, so it was no surprise this past October when my son gave me a stack of new books he thought would interest me. I have just finished one of them, Gun Barons: The Weapons that Transformed America and The Men Who Invented Them, by John Bainbridge, Jr. A history of such familiar companies as Colt, Smith & Wesson, Remington, and Winchester and of the inventors and entrepreneurs who founded them, it is a fascinating read for anyone who appreciates the importance of technological development and how innovations in one industrial sector have ripple effects in many others.

Who knew that the milling machine, critical to most high-tech industrial output, was invented in the early 19th Century at the Springfield Arsenal in Massachusetts? Or that practical interchangeable parts, central to “the American System of Manufactures”, were perfected in American clockmaking and firearms companies?

The book is very thorough and well-written and throughout the author’s tone sounded hauntingly familiar, as did his name. Out of 60+-year-old mists of memory formed the mental image of a face—always marked by a distinctive grin and a floppy forelock—accompanied by a particular voice, which both echoed high school memories.

Two things reinforced these. The title page’s verso lists the author’s birth year—1946, the same as mine—and the last page, a short author’s biography with his picture. There was the familiar grin and the same floppy forelock, only now several shades lighter than in adolescence, and as for so many of us the face now wore glasses.

According to the bio he, like I, was a late vocation to the law and had been a law clerk to a state supreme court. Only lawyers understand the significance of that; reading hundreds of appellate briefs and case records sticks with one over the years and shapes one’s thinking as nothing else would.

Google said that John had his own website, johnbainbridge.com, so I left an email on its contact link, although I haven’t yet heard back. Perhaps CRMS’s dogged alumni staff can lure him out of seclusion with an offer to feature his book in the school’s bookstore. Other alumni would be intrigued by how the CRMS experience has played out in someone else’s life.

– John A. Hollister ’64