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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Dracon" data-source="post: 3334455" data-attributes="member: 14799">CliveP - Your thread on the monocular interests me.  It begins with almost a Shakespearean quality - not quite Hamlet but its legitimacy brings out comments from the "Crown" (Lee) and the penal colony where England sent many of its bad boys (Rathaus), and even our erudite American (Brock) joins in the fray.Why do monoculars exist?  Obviously, for many reasons.  My sire, a Greek immigrant escaping grinding poverty, came to the US in 1910, after shoveling coal on a tramp steamer on the Athens to Buenos Aries run for several years earning passage. He was following four older brothers who prospered in the US.   My father didn't, and after creating four children during the depression, he and my mother divorced when I was five months old.  He eventually returned to Greece and died there. My father would have found a monocular useful.  Why?  He was blind in one eye, the result of a Damascus shotgun blowing up when he attempted to shoot some kind of wolf attacking some goats and sheep he was herding.Blindness almost disqualified him from seeking citizenship back then.I only saw him several times and remember his bad eye.  Hollywood would have made him a character actor. Then, a favorite nephew of mine suddenly and in-explicitly lost the sight in one eye.  He was a bird watcher who found the extra barrel unnecessary.  A most pragmatic sort of fellow - an electrical engineer.  So I had a much used set of Kern IF Army model 8x30 with one bad side and made a monocular out of the good side and presented that to him.  This he really liked and returned to his birding.As circumstances occurred, my first piece of optics was a Bushnell 7x35 monocular purchased when I went to the ranch in 1951 and attended Buffalo High. (there had to be a Buffalo High connection in this post)  I was just learning to hunt big game, then and the ranch was isolated and adjacent to the mountains.  This was a game rich area, abounding with mule deer, elk, bears (not grizzlies), prong horn antelope, and countless ducks and geese.The bag limits were generous, game wardens rarely seen, and hunting surpassing anything going on today.  There were only a few four-wheel drive vehicles in the Judith Basin.  The ranch had a new Jeep model with a metal cab.  Top speed was 35 mph.  No posted land existed, and the U.S. Forest Service land was open to anyone. In short it was a hunter's paradise and a perfect place for a gangling 15 year old lad to land and try out his new .300 Savage rifle on big game animals.When blizzards would roar in, that was the end of anyone coming to the mountains to hunt.  The county roads would drift in, and then it was walking or even better, riding horses when hunting.  The ranch I lived on was a horse outfit.  Vehicles couldn't get anywhere. But horses  could.  My monocular was always around my neck, with it tucked inside my shirt or jacket.  I didn't need binoculars.  Yet after several hard seasons of hunting, my monocular eventually met its demise.   Chasing animals was not legal, even back then, but as my monocular inevitably banged against the saddle horn too many times, eventually it caused the prisms to chip and move.  And my attempt to repair the damage proved futile.  It was 35 miles to the closest place where one could seek assistance.So my monocular was "retired" but over the years a host of different ones came into my possession, and maintained their usefullness.(to be continued)</blockquote>

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