Remembering Skeeter Skelton

Obviously, if you’re reading these posts, you are more discerning than most. And as someone knowledgeable in firearms history, you probably know who Skeeter Skelton was.

But sadly, not everyone remembers Skeeter, and he was a man worth remembering.

So here’s a little Skeeter biography.

Charles A. “Skeeter” Skelton was born May 1, 1928, in Hereford, Deaf Smith County, Texas. He did a stint in the Marine Corps before following a career in law enforcement.

He started off as a city patrolman in Amarillo, Texas. Then he joined U.S. Border Patrol, where he served on the last horse-mounted patrol in Arizona maintained by the agency. Later he served as deputy sheriff, and then as sheriff, of Deaf Smith County, Texas. After that he was a narcotics agent for U.S. Customs Service. He finished his law enforcement career as Special Agent in Charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

He retired from law enforcement in 1974.

That was the career that put beans on the table, but it was as a gun writer that Skeeter came to national prominence.

Skeeter wrote his first article in 1959, but I discovered him in 1966, when he started writing for Shooting Times. He was the magazine’s Handgun Editor for 21 years, and over those years he wrote more than 400 articles for Shooting Times. They were some of the best gun writing of any era.

Skeeter was technically expert in his subject, and he had years of law enforcement work which added to his credibility, but a lot of other gun writers could show the same sort of experience. What made Skeeter special was his style. It was relaxed and conversational. He never took himself too seriously…and he was one heck of a good story teller.

His "Me and Joe" stories of his Depression-era youth, while including references to period firearms, were character-oriented rather than technical pieces. And his 'Dobe Grant' and 'Jug Johnson' short stories may be the only fiction routinely published by a popular shooting magazine. And believe me, “Shooting Times” was happy to publish them.

Reading Skeeter’s work was one of the major inspirations for me to become a gun writer myself. Ironically, Skeeter passed away in 1988, the year I wrote my first published article.

And now you all know who Skeeter Skelton was.