I have read a great many old archery magazines but hadn’t read any for quite some time, but one caught my eye recently and I bought it. It is a February 1965 issue of TAM and Archery World, subtitled “Official Publication of the National Archery Association of the United States.” For those of you not so long of tooth, TAM stands for “The Archery Magazine” and the NAA was the former and still name (don’t ask it’s complicated) of USA Archery.
In this issue on page twelve is a column on Power Archery by Dave Keaggy, Sr. who came up with the Power Archery scheme, which to my understanding was the first fully delineated shooting technique published in the U.S. Dave, Sr. along with his son, Dave, Jr., promoted this shooting technique extensively, including through the book Power Archery, which is still worth a read.
The topic of this column is “Your False Release” so you can see that people have struggled with getting a clean release off of the bowstring for a long time. Here’s a taste “In theory there should be an instantaneous snap back of the arm because you are using thirty pounds of energy in the back and shoulders to hold a thirty pound bow. If there is no snap back from the string upon release you are deenergizing the back and shoulder muscles just prior to the instant of release and letting the arms set in a static position. This is basically the difference between a “dead release” and a “flying release.” Sounds like it could have been written yesterday and not 57 years ago, no?
And, you can probably understand why I became an editor. It bothers me still that he referred to “30 pounds” as an energy. It is not, it is a force.
Three pages onward is an article on “X-7 Exotic Metal Easton Arrow Revealed.” Easton had been making aluminum arrows for quite some time but this is the shaft with an “exotic metal” in it! Imagine considered aluminum, one of the most common metals in existence being considered “exotic!” Aluminum arrows were invented by Doug Easton well before this, but this form of aluminum was new to the effort. On the page opposite is an ad for “glass arrows,” not being some sort of award, but actual arrow shafts made from fiberglass. Those had not been relegated to summer camp archery classes at that time and were used for hunting, target shooting.
In the back is an announcement that Howatt Archery Manufacturing had invented the Variable Thrust Compensator, which was a forerunner of the Doinker. (I had one of the Hoyt versions, which they called Torque Flight Compensators.) Again, for those not so long in the tooth, this was a mechanical device, a small cylinder that screwed into your recurve bow as if they were “twin stabilizers” that offset some of the shock of the release and thereby one could tune the feel of their bow to be more or less lively (more or less “hand shock”) upon loosing.
Most of the bows shown in photos and advertisements are one piece recurve bows, as the three piece bows weren’t developed for mass production until the early 1970’s, about the same time compound bows were becoming popular.
There is much more, even a short article on the mental game. I also have found much of interest in the letters to the editor. Often enough these are letters are about other letters! Letters to the editor are from a bygone era as the instantaneous communication via the Internet has made them obsolete. They have been replaced by “comments,” etc.
In any case, if you run across any old archery magazines, don’t assume that all in them is obsolete information and there are always some joys to be plucked from their pages. As another example, in the issue above the Personality of the Month is Earl Hoyt, Jr.
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