Glen B. Watts of Lynbrook, L. I. has often broken 25 skeet targets in a row but he never enjoyed doing it so much as last week, when he was firing in the last round of the Great Eastern Individual Championship at Lordship, Conn. It was a dark, blustering day. Frank Trager of Roseland, N. J. and Ollie Mitchell of Waltham, Mass, had contrived to run up creditable strings of 96 out of 100. With 73 targets already broken—in strings of 25, 23, 25—Watts knew that he needed a 23 to tie, a 24 to win. Moving slowly around the half-circle he fired with concentrated rapidity and precision. He broke the first 14 without a miss, then the critical 15th and 16th from the centre station. Now came the doubles, at stations Nos. 1, 2, 6 and 7. He powdered the first three pairs and moved to station No. 8, needing one to tie, two to win. As both targets fell in bits to earth he threw off his hat, called for his final, unnecessary bird and smashed that too, for a brilliant 98 and the Great Eastern title.
Ollie Mitchell had the satisfaction of knowing that his 96 helped his Waltham Gun Club to win the Great Eastern team championship with 466, but most of the skeeters at Lordship last week felt a little less chipper about their scores when the results of the National Telegraphic Championship began to come in. The Izaak Walton League of Los Angeles had won the Telegraphic Team Championship with 473. Two Westerners—E. S. Neusch-wander of Los Angeles and George Debes of Houston—shooting under better weather conditions, had bettered Watts' 98 by one target each and Thomas Mairs of Utica had tied it.
William Harnden Foster, editor of National Sportsman and Hunting and Fishing, claims credit for inventing skeet, in 1925. But as early as 1910 the late C. E. Davies and other Ballard Vale, Mass, gunners, Editor Foster among them, had hit on its basic idea. Ordinary trapshooting, with the gunner firing always from the same position, seemed too static to them. They wanted something more like real hunting. On the grounds of the Glen Rock Kennels they traced a great circle, set up a trap outside it, then moved around the circle potting the flying targets from all angles.
For over a decade the new sport remained a nameless Ballard Vale backlot pastime. Then Editor Foster decided to tell the world about it—chiefly because he wanted to boom the arms & ammunition business, get more advertising into his magazines. In February 1926 he launched a nation-wide promotional campaign, offered $100 for a name. The money went to a Montana rancher's wife who suggested "skeet," an obsolete word, probably Scandinavian, meaning "to shoot."