Remember your first airgun? The excitement. The pride. The fun. For millions of today's shooters the name on that first gun was Daisy. Today, we're still the first choice when it comes to introducing a young shooter to airgunning. Simple, easy-to-use designs. Safety features built-in. Ideal for developing shooting and marksmanship skills--Daisy covers the beginner airgun market like no other.

Hopalong Cassidy was in the movies, Tom Mix was on radio and comic books and magazines such as American Boy and Boy's Life ran ads for every boy's dream–the Daisy Red Ryder Western Carbine. What a time to be young. BB guns were decidedly a step up from slingshots and homemade bows and arrows that were called on for shooting at assorted targets: tin cans, pesky varmints

The Daisy saga began in the late 1800s at the Plymouth Iron Windmill Co. in Plymouth, Mich. Windmills were common in rural areas to generate electricity and pump water. But they weren't turning much of a profit for Plymouth, and the company was close to going under. One day, a local inventor by the name of Clarence Hamilton walked in to show Plymouth's general manager, L.C. Hough, his latest brainstorm. He unwrapped a contraption that resembled a gun. The barrel was conventional enough, but the stock was simply a piece of wire bent to an approximate shape.

Hamilton cocked the weapon, rolled a size BB lead ball down the barrel and offered the piece to Hough. "Go ahead, shoot it," he said. Hough took aim at his almost full wastepaper basket. Kapling! The ball blasted through the side. Interested now, Hough took the gun outside and set up a shingle as a target 10 ft. away. Kersmack! The ball penetrated clear through the wood. Impressed, Hough turned to Hamilton and used the common slang expression of the day–"Boy, that's a daisy." The name stuck. If that air gun had been invented today, it probably would have been called something like the "Way Cool."

IT'S A DAISY
The Daisy Red Ryder
Western Carbine air rifle has beenthe stuff of dreams for boys–and grown men–for generations.

BY CLIFF GROMER
Published on: July 1, 1999
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A Christmas Story
The gun, named for the comic strip cowboy Red Ryder, remained a favorite among children for decades and was the inspiration for 1983's A Christmas Story, about a young boy in the 1940s who longs for "an official Red Ryder, carbine action, 200-shot, Range Model air rifle with a compass on the stock and this thing which tells time."

In the movie, little Ralphie dubs the gun "the Holy Grail of Christmas gifts" but is admonished by numerous adults (his mother, his teacher, even a department store Santa) that "you'll shoot your eye out!"

Who's Fred Harman, you ask? He's the cartoonist who created Ralphie's hero, Red Ryder, and his Indian sidekick, Little Beaver. But his love of the frontier West didn't stop with the world-renowned series that first appeared in the Chicago Sun on Nov. 6, 1938. In his final 18 years, Harman produced 350 oils, pen-and-ink drawings, and bronzes of rodeos, cowpokes and other rustic scenes.