Red Star pics

[Texag45]

The rifles DID NOT follow Maj. Levin from duty station to duty station. John is correct that they were stored in a basement in Dayton, Ohio. Will Levin's next duty station was Eglin AFB in Florida and from there he was stationed in Los Angeles, CA where he ultimately retired from the Air Force. The rifles were shipped from Dayton to Los Angeles. Only one minor correction, the basement was the basement of his cousin, not brother, who was in the wine business in Dayton. As for wood shavings, I have never seen any. I'm not saying that some crates opened previously didn't have wood shavings. The two crates that I've seen opened, and quite a few rifles that I've seen that still had cosmoline and "straw" on them from crates that had been opened in previous years, certainly had no wood shavings.

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[Garandrew]

TexaG45...I have a feeling he would know what hes talking about! :-)
Andy in CT :-) :-)

[Terry Hawker]

The rifles DID NOT follow Maj. Levin from duty station to duty station. John is correct that they were stored in a basement in Dayton, Ohio. Will Levin's next duty station was Eglin AFB in Florida and from there he was stationed in Los Angeles, CA where he ultimately retired from the Air Force. The rifles were shipped from Dayton to Los Angeles. Only one minor correction, the basement was the basement of his cousin, not brother, who was in the wine business in Dayton. As for wood shavings, I have never seen any. I'm not saying that some crates opened previously didn't have wood shavings. The two crates that I've seen opened, and quite a few rifles that I've seen that still had cosmoline and "straw" on them from crates that had been opened in previous years, certainly had no wood shavings.

Texag45,

As far as the "duty station to duty station" comment is concerned, please see my reply to John.

"Wood shavings" and "straw" - Perhaps we are only discussing semantics here. "Wood shavings" does conjure up a picture of nice, wide, curling strips, rising up from a woodplane, I admit, so it probably isn't the correct term to describe what was in the five crates at Loren's. "Straw" is that hollow-tubed, dry plant product fed to animals - also not was in those five crates. If you are using "straw" as a generic term for that old packing material, much like we now use "peanuts" to describe the styrofoam packing material we use today, then you are quite correct.

It was mentioned that the latest two crates opened had very little "straw" in them, and, perhaps, that is part of the problem...Just not enough material to notice the difference. Some of the open crates I saw at Red Star were full of the stuff. As can be seen in the photos where it is stuck on the rifles, it consisted of bits and pieces of various sizes and fibers. The handfuls of stuff I saw in the crates were rather odd, usually white, rounded bundles of extremely thin fibers, strange enough to prompt, "What the heck is this stuff?" It was much too thin to be straw, wasn't hollow inside as straw is, and when I broke several strands in half, discovered it was a wood product of some sort. How it was made, I don't know, but I would guess it may have been produced through some shredding process of lumber scraps.

Whether this same stuff was used in all the crates, I couldn't say, but it is what was inside the Red Star crates, and, I see lots of it stuck to the rifles in the photos. Yes, some straw could easily have been mixed in with it in some of the crates, but I didn't see any in the crates at Loren's.

Regards,

Terry