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A
San Antonio newspaper printed a rather simple obituary in January of
1945. Elizabeth
Servanty Topperwein had passed on and joined the Great Majority.
Casual readers could easily have passed over the few words describing
the deceased. The name Elizabeth Servanty meant little to the good
people of San Antonio; however, the name Topperwein throughout America
meant ‘‘the world’s greatest husband and wife shooting
team.’’
The lady put to rest
that rainy January morning was once told by Annie
Oakley that she was the greatest shooter of all times! That’s a
pretty strong statement by any measure, but coming from one Annie
Oakley, it can’t be taken with a grain of powder.
Like all of us, Miss
Servanty was young once. At the age of 18 in 1904, she was a pretty
red head working as an inspector on an ammunition-loading machine at
the Winchester plant in New Haven, Conn. One afternoon a handsome
Winchester trick shooter from Texas stopped at Elizabeth’s station,
and they exchanged a few words. After he 
moved on, she said to a co-worker, "I’m going to marry that man
someday."
The trick shooter’s
name was Adolph P. Topperwein. Some folks called him Ad; others called
him Top. He was born in 1869 in a little Texas town called Leon
Springs, not far from San Antonio. His father became a well-known
gunsmith for buffalo hunters. Before he was 10, Ad had mastered his
14-ga. muzzle-loading shotgun and Flobert rifle and was supplying game
to the family’s dinner table. When he was 11, he saw Doc
Carver’s act in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and confided to
all who listened that he would eventually be as famous a shooter as
Carver. By the time he was 21, most all of San Antonio knew of his
skill with the rifle, shotgun and pistol.
The manager of the
local Grand Opera House made Ad his protégé and persuaded booking
agents to put him in Vaudeville. He was soon performing in New York
City.
One afternoon at Coney
Island, he broke all of the targets in one shooting gallery after
another The next day, the New York papers were full of the feats of
the unknown Texas triggerman. He had made the grade.
 Shortly
after the turn of the century, he became bored with Vaudeville and
started looking around for more stable employment. He found it with
the Winchester Repeating Arms Company whose guns and ammunition he had
long preferred.
Soon he was traveling
the country for Winchester, performing trick shooting exhibitions at
fairs, gun clubs and sportsmen shows.
A week or so after Ad
spoke with Elizabeth at her inspection station at the Winchester
plant, they met quite by accident in New Haven Commons. Soon
afterwards, they married, and life for the new Mrs. Topperwein would
never be the same. Ad began to teach her to shoot, and within three
weeks of her first lesson, she was shooting chalk from between his
fingers with a .22 rifle and splitting playing cards held edgewise at
25 feet.
During her early
shooting lessons, she often missed while shooting a .22 at tin cans
thrown in the air. When she did hit one, the bullet made a
"plinking" sound. Each time she connected, she would
invariably say, ‘I plinked it." Ad picked up on this, and for
the rest of her days she was known as ‘Plinky." She called him
‘Daddy." They made their first appearance as a husband and wife
trick shooting act at the 1904 St Louis World’s Fair. She had been
shooting less than three months.
Six months after she
pulled the trigger for the first time, she became a member of the
famous Winchester trapshooting squad that toured the South in the fall
of 1904. At Albany, GA, the team broke the existing world’s record
by breaking 490x500. Plinky broke 96x100 that day.
Forest
McNeir, the 1940 North American Clay Target Champion, had this to
say about her in his 1956 autobiography:
In 1909
the first Sunny South shoot was held in Houston. Mrs. Ad Topperwein
won the handicap on 96.
Mrs.
Top was the best woman shot of her day. I knew Annie Oakley and
Buffalo Bill but they were exhibition shooters—rifles, pistols and
shotguns.
After
she won the Sunny South all the men hung their watch fobs, diamond
medals, rings and stick pins on her when she dressed up to go to the
old Prince Theater She looked like a walking jewelry store.
The
Sunny South prize was $100 in gold and she had five $20 gold pieces
pasted on a piece of black silk to form a locket. She told Top if he
didn’t stop laughing at her she would split his mustache with the
toe of her
boot.
That
afternoon Jack Wulf who later won the Grand American in 1916 at St.
Louis, wanted to take a picture of Mrs. Top sitting between Bill
Crosby and Fred
Gilbert (1968 ATA Hall of Fame inductees). They were sitting on a
steep slope facing the sun. Wulf told them not to look at him, to look
at the sun. They did and he let go a nine foot spotted snake out of a
spring box right into their laps.
Mrs.
Top went over backwards down the slope. You never did see so many
flying skirts upside down. When she got up she looked like a half
peeled banana. Everybody enjoyed it except for her and what she said
to Jack wouldn’t do to print.
 Shortly
after winning the Sunny South handicap Buffalo Bill presented her with
an Indian-made beaded ammunition pouch that she wore continuously
until her shooting days ended. (This pouch is now on display at the
Trapshooting Hall of Fame Museum in Vandalia, Ohio.)
She broke nine 100
straights in 1913, but her best shooting that year was done in
Laramie, Wyo. where in gale-force winds she won the Denver Post Trophy
with 94x100 handicap targets. Shooters at the Eastern Handicap at
Wilmington, Del., saw her lead the field of 250 with 98x100.
Plinky set an endurance
record, shooting alone, at Montgomery, Ala., in 1916 by breaking 1,952
of 2,000 clay targets in 5 hours and 20 minutes. She shot a 7-lb.
Model 12 Winchester and didn’t rest a minute despite the fact that
the barrel became so hot a number of times that ice water had to be
poured over it. She suffered a blistered hand but was still shooting
better than when she began. She broke 96 of her first 100 targets and
98 of her last. Her lowest score was 95, and her average for the 2,000
was slightly less than 98%.
A newspaper article
once summed up her performance at a local gun club saying, "Mrs.
Topperwein’s style of shooting was one of unstudied grace and ease,
without any effort and apparently without any thought as to where and
at what angle the target would go."
She loved to quote the
poem composed by her famous husband early in their marriage. It goes
like this:
Lincoln
Was Right
You may hit some of your targets most of the time
And hit most of your targets some of the time
But you can’t hit all of your targets every time all of the
time.
No matter how great your skill and how hard you try,
Sooner or later you’ll let one go by.
Plinky retired from
competitive trapshooting in the 1920s after the birth of her only
child, a son. History has failed to record what became of this child
whose mother and father once thrilled thousands at a time when
Americans idolized those who could shoot.
A few months after her
death, some 56 years ago, an article appeared in a shooting
publication that said, in part,
"The World’s
greatest woman shooter isn’t with us any more. She passed way
suddenly but quietly in San Antonio, her only regret that she would be
parted, temporarily, from her beloved Daddy’
Perhaps people may
forget that she once broke 367 clay targets in a row, that she broke
200 straight 14 times, 100 straight on more than 200 occasions and set
an endurance record that still stands. But not a living soul who knew
Plinky Topperwein will ever forget her great warm heart, which she
wore openly on her sleeve in adoration of her accomplished husband and
the man who made her famous. Nor will they forget her ready wit, her
firm handshake, her cheerful voice and the way her eyes crinkled that
ever-recurring smile.
Ad Topperwein waited 17
years to be reunited with Plinky. He died in 1962, at the age of 93.
The end didn’t come easy. He was hopelessly blind and almost totally
deaf. Top resided until the end in a small house in San Antonio
surrounded by long-ago pictures and trophies he couldn’t see and was
cared for by an elderly lady who just thought it was the right thing
to do.
When the Trapshooting
Hall of Fame selected its first inductees in 1969, Plinky was in this
select group. Another woman shooter was also chosen in that initial
year, and she was a great admirer of Mrs. Topperwein. Her given name
was Phoebe Ann Moses, but the world knew her as Annie Oakley.
If you are interested
in trapshooting history, try to stop by the Trapshooting Hall of Fame
and Museum located at the ATA headquarters in Vandalia. The museum
houses one of the largest collections of trapshooting memorabilia in
the world and is open to the public free of charge Monday through
Friday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Should you have a
trapshooting artifact that you would like information about, contact
me at the Trapshooting Hall of Fame and Museum, 601
National Rd., Vandalia, OH 45377. 17Ie
museum is always looking for select items to add to our collection of
shooting memorabilia.
Visit us on our web site
at www.traphoforg.
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