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Plenty for eyes to take in at BB gun museum

At the Daisy Airgun Museum, a display recounts the role of the company’s Red Ryder BB gun in the perennially popular 1983 movie A Christmas Story.
At the Daisy Airgun Museum, a display recounts the role of the company’s Red Ryder BB gun in the perennially popular 1983 movie A Christmas Story.

ROGERS -- Ralphie Parker is relegated to a cameo role at the Daisy Airgun Museum, even though his fictional self starred in A Christmas Story. That 1983 movie turned the Daisy company's Red Ryder BB gun into a perennial holiday fixture.

An alcove featuring A Christmas Story is the 13th of 29 display areas at the exhibit-packed museum in downtown Rogers. Although the presentation is colorful, a casual visitor could overlook it among the cornucopia (grouches might say "plethora") of guns and other memorabilia arrayed in the maze-like layout.

If you are among the umpteen million Americans who owned a Daisy rifle as a youngster, the museum will be as fascinating as the Baseball Hall of Fame would be to a lifelong big-league fan. If you're clueless about airguns, you'll learn that they operate on compressed air and fire a BB or other metal pellet at a relatively low velocity.

The Red Ryder BB gun gets much more museum attention than Ralphie. Unless you're a senior citizen, Red Ryder may be unknown to you. He was a popular movie-serial cowboy in the 1930s and rode the range as a comic-strip character until 1964.

As museumgoers are told, the Red Ryder is the best-known BB gun ever built. Manufactured from March 1940 until Daisy switched to World War II military gear in mid-1942, it resumed production in late 1945 and sold more than a million rifles in 1949 alone.

An oddity of A Christmas Story is that the Red Ryder his parents give Ralphie has a compass and sundial in the stock, which was not the case with assembly-line Red Ryders. To satisfy the film's producers, Daisy installed a compass and sundial in three guns to be used as on-screen props.

Museum visitors learn that the current Daisy Outdoor Products company began in 1882 as the Plymouth Iron Windmill Co. in that Michigan town. With the business failing in 1888, the owners made an all-metal airgun and offered it as a premium to any farmer who would buy a windmill.

As the story goes, an inventor had approached Daisy executives with that airgun, which board members passed around. Supposedly one of them exclaimed, "Boy, that's a daisy!" Thus the gun was named and the rest is history.

Daisy moved its operations to Rogers in 1958 and opened a small museum here in 1966. When the company outsourced its manufacture of parts in 1997, mainly to China, assembly of the rifles was moved to Neosho, Mo. A larger museum was opened in downtown Rogers in 2000, with Arkansas' first lady at the time, Janet Huckabee, shooting through a ribbon to mark the dedication.

In 2007, Daisy brought its assembly operations back to Rogers, three years after the museum was moved to its present location. The company's rifles and other products are partly made in America -- put together here from Chinese-built parts. That could be viewed as ironic, given that private possession of firearms is generally forbidden in China.

One of the museum's display areas is devoted to Daisy's role in gun education. The 48-page guide booklet to the site asserts that "more young people have learned how to shoot safely with a Daisy BB gun than any other brand. The company has been a leader in shooter education since 1948, when it offered medals in conjunction with the National Rifle Association."

Fans of A Christmas Story, based on Jean Shepherd's stories, will recall that Ralphie's parents and teacher warned, "You'll shoot your eye out." Excited to actually get the gun on Christmas morning, he takes it outside and shoots at a backyard target. The BB ricochets back and knocks off his glasses. Searching for the glasses, thinking he has shot out an eye, he steps on them.

Ralphie tells his mother that a falling icicle broke his glasses. She believes the lie. The movie ends with Ralphie in bed on Christmas night, the gun at his side. In a voice-over, his adult self says that this was the best present he ever received.

Whatever the actual hazards of airguns, that's a happy ending suited to this upbeat museum.

The Daisy Airgun Museum, 202 W. Walnut St., Rogers, is open 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Saturday. Admission is $2 (free for kids 13 and under). Call (479) 986-6873 or visit daisymuseum.com

Weekend on 11/12/2015

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