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Legacy isn't handed down. Or NBC News. I'm Tom Brokham. We hope to see you back here. I'm Lester Holt.
It's carried forward. Tom Yamis is there for us. Firefighters are still working around the clock. As the world changes, we look for what endures. We are coming on the air with breaking news right now.
We look for a constant. And from one era to the next, trust is the anchor. For NBC Nightly News, I'm Tom Yamis. A new chapter begins. NBC Nightly News with Tom Yamis.
Evenings on NBC. Yeah. Uh Mm-hmm. And we continue here on Our American Stories. Ruger is the biggest gun manufacturer in the country.
And it's not by accident. In the words of William Ruger, each firearm is built, quote, to a standard so I would want one even if it was made by our competitors. Here to tell this American story is Logan Medish. Logan is a firearms historian and museum professional who runs High Caliber History, LLC. Here's Logan.
The timing really couldn't have been better for William Ruger when he and Alexander Stern became business partners in January of 1949. Rugrid had been making hand tools for the previous few years, but unfortunately business was not going well for him. He found himself $40,000 in debt and he was pretty much ready to close up shop when he showed Sturm a prototype of something that he was working on which harkened back to his earlier days with military arms development.
So Sturm liked what he saw and agreed to bankroll the project with $50,000 in seed money. And just like that, those two men began laying the foundation for what would become one of the largest firearm companies in the United States. But in order to get there you have to realize where they came from So let's start with William Ruger. His dad was a lawyer and his mother was from a family that owned a successful chain of department stores. As an interesting aside, his great-grandfather was actually a drummer boy at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.
Anyway, so Bill Ruger had always been interested in firearms and tinkering with designs and very mechanically inclined. In fact, he patented his first machine gun when he was just 16 years old. With the help of his aunt, who had set him up with a college fund, he ended up going to the University of North Carolina, where he continued to work on arms designs, specifically a blow-forward-style machine gun. While he was in college, he met a girl named Mary Thompson. She was from a well-heeled family there in North Carolina, and they got married in 1938.
Bill was just finishing up his sophomore year of college, but when he got married, he quit, and the two of them promptly took off for a three-month-long European honeymoon. Once back in the States, Bill continued to work on developing different firearms designs and one of the things he started to do was tinker with an existing design. He took a Savage Model 99 lever action rifle and converted it into a gas operated self-loading repeating rifle. And rightly so, he was pretty darn proud of his work, so he took it to New York City and demonstrated it to the executives at Savage. And he found himself rather baffled when they weren't absolutely astounded with what he had done.
You know, he was hoping they would buy the design and bring him on board as a designer and offer him a job, but that just wasn't the case.
So Bill found himself with a young wife, a newborn son, Bill Jr., an empty inheritance coffer, and no job.
So he went back down to North Carolina and as luck would have it, he ended up getting a telegram that offered him a job at Springfield Armory in Springfield, Massachusetts, for thirty two dollars and fifty cents a week. It was really not something he was in a position to pass up, so he took the job, but he didn't stay there for terribly long. He ended up quitting in the spring of 1940. He quit because he didn't want to end up like John Garand, who he felt was treated like a mechanical toy and was paid what he felt to be a mediocre salary for all of his contributions. Which is really saying something because John Garand is of course one of the greatest arms designers of the 20th century and you and I and anyone else in the gun world would consider it an honor to end up like John Garand, but not Bill Ruger.
That was not good enough for him. He aspired to higher things.
So he went and continued refocusing his efforts on his machine gun designs. And he pitched the idea to Smith and Wesson. They turned him down. But they did offer him a job. They saw his potential as a designer, and Smith Wesson offered him a job for $75 a week, which was a nice pay bump, obviously.
But Bill's pride kind of got in the way, and he rejected it. And on down the road, he went to another gun company, this time high standard. They weren't interested, but they told him again to head on down the road and try his luck with auto ordnance.
So Bill went over to auto ordinance and a little while later they ended up hiring him as an arms designer. And his pay was somewhere around $100 a week.
So he took that job around the beginning of World War II and he stayed on as an arms designer for them until the end of the war in 1945. By 1946, Bill had gone into business for himself. He always wanted to be self-employed and have the freedom to do his own thing and design his own stuff. And so that's exactly what he did with the Ruger Corporation. They were making hand tools and small industrial parts.
And also, he was working on his design for a.22 caliber pistol. But unfortunately, like I'd mentioned earlier on, business wasn't doing so well. The whole hand tool concept was a good idea, but it was proving too pricey for the market.
So by 1949, Bill was basically flat broke when he met Alexander Sturm.
Now, Sturm was an interesting guy. He was a legacy Yale graduate and like Bill was from a well-to-do family and was always sporting custom tailored clothes and taking weekend trips to New York City and while the rest of his Yale classmates ate at the cafeteria on campus, he dined at the finest restaurants in the hotels in the local area. He was kind of a Renaissance man. He dabbled in a little bit of everything including writing, acting, painting, film making, and he was also a big time collector of all sorts of different things, one of which just happened to be firearms. Adding to the oddity that is the life of Alexander Sturm, this well-bred young man served during World War II with the Office of Strategic Services, which was the forerunner of sorts for today's CIA.
So with that $50,000 worth of seed money, they started their company and their first factory, and I use that term loosely, was in a small, unassuming building that they affectionately dubbed the Red Barn across the street from a railroad depot in Southport, Connecticut. It was essentially just Bill and Alex and a couple of toolmakers all working, you know, long, long hours into the night. And Bill actually mentioned at one point he was writing the final payroll check from the initial $50,000 and they were out of cash. And he told Alex, he said, this is the last bit of money. for the original $50,000 investment.
But that was okay because they had designed this pistol together and Alex Sturm had checks for a hundred guns that were ready to be sent out into the mail. And so just like that, they were in business, the seed money paid off.
Now, this gun that they designed together was inspired by World War II handguns from the Axis powers. It had a similar silhouette appearance of both the Japanese Nambu and the German Luger in certain ways. The ergonomics of those guns were tweaked a little bit to create what would become known as the Ruger Standard, and the gun would go on to be lauded by shooters for generations as being well balanced, easy to hold, and easy to shoot. Unfortunately, the gun is a bit of a Rubik's Cube in design when it comes to putting the gun back together. And when we come back, we'll continue with the story of Ruger.
The Great American Company, and my goodness, how it got started, is like how so many companies got started. On the cheap. and almost out of business from the beginning. More of the story of Ruger. The Great American Gun Company.
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