It was a bad day and it hasnt got much better

E

ebb

Member
My friend, shooting buddy and mentor Jon Newman passed Thursday at 1:30 am after a long struggle with cancer. He fought hard and endured much pain for many years. I will miss him greatly. He posted here under the name Octopus. Please keep him and his family in your thoughts and prayers. thanks mark
 
I am sorry for your loss, and ours!

I am sorry you have lost a friend and fellow shooter. All in the shooting community suffer loss when another dedicated shooter passes on. It is a truism that the older we get, the more friends we lose. I firmly believe that our hope is in the new youngsters coming along and in our faith that we'll all meet again in a better place.
 
Thank you

I am sorry to hear Octopus has left us. He helped me a few years ago and his information was very good.
Sorry you lost a friend.
Centerfire.
 
Sad day indeed

The first year I planned to go to Florida for the winter months, I posted here looking for a place to shoot. Jon posted right away, inviting me to his place to shoot with he and his friends. I accepted his invitation and over the past five years, visited a time or two each winter. Jon and I spoke often by phone and email, sharing our ideas on guns and shooting. Jon documented every shot he fired in a data base on his laptop. He had lots of interest in Wildcatting and the .25 caliber. He also loved the Walldog and had a new unique reamer made a couple of years ago for it. I feel fortunate in having a barrel that was chambered by that reamer.

My sincere condolences to Jon's family and all his friends. Jon was a very interesting and unique individual. He will be missed by many.

Peter Wass
 
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Peter, he told me about the first time you shot with him, its a funny story. He said he was loading bullets and not watching to close, then when he got to his bench he looked down at your target. He noticed that there were holes all over the place, he told me this guy is gona have along day if that's all the better he shoots. Then we went down and looked at the targets and they were really small groups not bullet holes. He told me it was I that had the long day, and he said it had been a long time since he had seen anyone shoot as good as you. I haven't shot or reloaded anything since they found he had tumors in his brain about 4 or 5 months ago, I just haven't felt like.
 
ebb said:
Peter, he told me about the first time you shot with him, its a funny story. He said he was loading bullets and not watching to close, then when he got to his bench he looked down at your target. He noticed that there were holes all over the place, he told me this guy is gona have along day if that's all the better he shoots. Then we went down and looked at the targets and they were really small groups not bullet holes. He told me it was I that had the long day, and he said it had been a long time since he had seen anyone shoot as good as you. I haven't shot or reloaded anything since they found he had tumors in his brain about 4 or 5 months ago, I just haven't felt like.
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Jon was a great guy and a lot of fun to be with. He was one of the more interesting people I have been around. Jon did a lot of interesting things during his life.

Regarding the shooting; One year I took one of my HBR rifles with me. I had a bunch of rounds loaded up with Speer TNT bullets seated at a seating depth I thought might work. I also had just had a tuner installed on the barrel. I sat down and began to tune the barrel using the tuner and rounds I had with me. He watched as I made the groups smaller and smaller until there was one bullet hole. He was somewhat amazed, to say the least. It inspired him to work with tuners some.
 
He used to mess with my head buy assigning me Arkansas points if I screwed up or left some thing at home I would need at the range. They had me so mad one day I couldn't hit the backstop. The next trip I told them I was going to shoot my plan and they couldn't get in my head no matter what. They were teaching me and it took the trip home to figure it out. He told me for years that he thought Capt Bob could out shoot him but he could get in Bobs head most days. He made a homemade tuner and put it on a take off barrel off a Browning A bolt that had been rechambered to a 25BR, if he had a while to play with it he could get it to shoot pretty well. He whipped me with it a bunch of times. I saw a picture at his house with a Goliath Grouper back when they were legal its tail was on the dock and its head was 3 or 4 feet over Jon's head, he swam down and speared it and pulled it up to the little boat and towed it home by himself.
 
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