June 13, 2025 • 9 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, The Union soldiers at Andersonville Prison were near starvation and dehydration when prayer saved thousands of lives. To understand the history of America, it is essential to recognize the significant role the Bible has played in shaping our country. Our Founding Fathers, both Christian and non-Christian, were heavily influenced by the Bible. Here to share another story is Robert Morgan, author of 100 Bible Verses That Made America.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
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 Metish. Logan is
(00:31):
a firearms historian, a museum professional who runs High Caliber
History LLC. Here's Logan.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
The timing really couldn't have been better for William Ruger
when he and Alexander Stern became business partners in January
of nineteen forty nine. Ruger had been making hand tools
for the previous few years, but unfortunately business was not
going well for him. He found himself forty thousand dollars
(01:01):
in debt and he was pretty much ready to close
up shop when he showed Storm a prototype of something
that he was working on, which harkened back to his
earlier days with military arms development. So Sterm liked what
he saw and agreed to bankroll the project with fifty
thousand dollars in seed money, and just like that, those
(01:24):
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
(01:44):
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 eighteen fifteen. Anyway,
so Bill Ruger had always been interested in firearms and
tinkering with designs, and very mechanically inclined. In fact, he
(02:06):
patented his first machine gun when he was just sixteen
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
(02:29):
girl named Mary Thompson. She was from a well healed
family there in North Carolina, and they got married in
nineteen thirty eight. 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,
(02:52):
Bill continued to work on developing different firearms designs, and
one of the things he started to do was tinker
with existing design. He took a Savage Model ninety nine
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
(03:14):
New York City and demonstrated it to the executives at
Savage and 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
(03:36):
a young wife, a newborn son, Bill Junior, 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
(03:57):
and fifty cents a week. He 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 nineteen forty.
He quit because he didn't want to end up like
John Garrand, who he felt was treated like a mechanical
(04:17):
toy and was paid what he felt to be a
mediocre salary for all of his contributions, which is really
saying something, because John Garrand is, of course one of
the greatest arms designers of the twentieth century, and you
and I and anyone else in the gun world would
consider it an honor to end up like John Garrand,
(04:40):
but not Bill Ruger. That was not good enough for him.
He aspired to hire 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
his potential as a designer, and Smith and Wesson offered
(05:04):
him a job for seventy five dollars a week, which
was a nice pay bomp, 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 Ordinance. So Bill went over to
(05:25):
Auto Ordinance, and a little while later they ended up
hiring him as an arms designer, and his pay was
somewhere around one hundred dollars a week. So he took
that job around the beginning of World War Two, and
he stayed on as an arms designer for them until
the end of the war in nineteen forty five. By
nineteen forty six, Bill had gone into business for himself.
(05:47):
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 twenty
two caliber pistol. But unfortunately, like I'd mentioned earlier on,
(06:08):
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 nineteen forty nine Bill was
basically flat broke when he met Alexander Stern. Now Storm
was an interesting guy. He was a legacy Yale graduate
(06:29):
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
(06:49):
dabbled in a little bit of everything, including writing, acting, painting, filmmaking,
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 Sturn. This well bred young man served during
(07:10):
World War Two with the Office of Strategic Services, which
was the forerunner of sorts for today's CIA. So with
that fifty thousand dollars worth of seed money, they started
their company, and their first factory, and I used that
term loosely, was in a small, unassuming building that they
affectionately dubbed the Red Barn, across the street from a
(07:33):
railroad depot in Southport, Connecticut. It was essentially just Bill
and alex and a couple of tool makers, all working long,
long hours into the night, and Bill actually mentioned at
one point he was writing the final payroll check from
the initial fifty thousand dollars and they were out of cash,
(07:55):
and he told Alex, he said, this is the last
bit of money for the original film, fifty thousand dollars investment.
But that was okay because they had designed this pistol together,
and Alex Stern had checks for one hundred guns that
were ready to be sent out into the mail, and
so just like that, they were in business. The seed
(08:16):
money paid off. Now, this gun that they designed together
was inspired by World War Two handguns from the Axis Powers.
It had a similar silhouette appearance of both the Japanese
Namboo and the German Luger. In certain ways, the ergonomics
of those guns were tweaked a little bit to create
(08:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
And when we come back, we'll continue with the story
of Ruger, the Great American Company, and my goodness, how
it got started. It is like how so many companies
got started. I'm the cheap and almost out of business
from the beginning. More of the story of Ruger, the
Great American gun company. After these messages, this is our
American stories.
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 Metish. Logan is
(00:31):
a firearms historian, a museum professional who runs High Caliber
History LLC. Here's Logan.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
The timing really couldn't have been better for William Ruger
when he and Alexander Stern became business partners in January
of nineteen forty nine. Ruger had been making hand tools
for the previous few years, but unfortunately business was not
going well for him. He found himself forty thousand dollars
(01:01):
in debt and he was pretty much ready to close
up shop when he showed Storm a prototype of something
that he was working on, which harkened back to his
earlier days with military arms development. So Sterm liked what
he saw and agreed to bankroll the project with fifty
thousand dollars in seed money, and just like that, those
(01:24):
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
(01:44):
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 eighteen fifteen. Anyway,
so Bill Ruger had always been interested in firearms and
tinkering with designs, and very mechanically inclined. In fact, he
(02:06):
patented his first machine gun when he was just sixteen
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
(02:29):
girl named Mary Thompson. She was from a well healed
family there in North Carolina, and they got married in
nineteen thirty eight. 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,
(02:52):
Bill continued to work on developing different firearms designs, and
one of the things he started to do was tinker
with existing design. He took a Savage Model ninety nine
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
(03:14):
New York City and demonstrated it to the executives at
Savage and 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
(03:36):
a young wife, a newborn son, Bill Junior, 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
(03:57):
and fifty cents a week. He 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 nineteen forty.
He quit because he didn't want to end up like
John Garrand, who he felt was treated like a mechanical
(04:17):
toy and was paid what he felt to be a
mediocre salary for all of his contributions, which is really
saying something, because John Garrand is, of course one of
the greatest arms designers of the twentieth century, and you
and I and anyone else in the gun world would
consider it an honor to end up like John Garrand,
(04:40):
but not Bill Ruger. That was not good enough for him.
He aspired to hire 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
his potential as a designer, and Smith and Wesson offered
(05:04):
him a job for seventy five dollars a week, which
was a nice pay bomp, 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 Ordinance. So Bill went over to
(05:25):
Auto Ordinance, and a little while later they ended up
hiring him as an arms designer, and his pay was
somewhere around one hundred dollars a week. So he took
that job around the beginning of World War Two, and
he stayed on as an arms designer for them until
the end of the war in nineteen forty five. By
nineteen forty six, Bill had gone into business for himself.
(05:47):
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 twenty
two caliber pistol. But unfortunately, like I'd mentioned earlier on,
(06:08):
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 nineteen forty nine Bill was
basically flat broke when he met Alexander Stern. Now Storm
was an interesting guy. He was a legacy Yale graduate
(06:29):
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
(06:49):
dabbled in a little bit of everything, including writing, acting, painting, filmmaking,
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 Sturn. This well bred young man served during
(07:10):
World War Two with the Office of Strategic Services, which
was the forerunner of sorts for today's CIA. So with
that fifty thousand dollars worth of seed money, they started
their company, and their first factory, and I used that
term loosely, was in a small, unassuming building that they
affectionately dubbed the Red Barn, across the street from a
(07:33):
railroad depot in Southport, Connecticut. It was essentially just Bill
and alex and a couple of tool makers, all working long,
long hours into the night, and Bill actually mentioned at
one point he was writing the final payroll check from
the initial fifty thousand dollars and they were out of cash,
(07:55):
and he told Alex, he said, this is the last
bit of money for the original film, fifty thousand dollars investment.
But that was okay because they had designed this pistol together,
and Alex Stern had checks for one hundred guns that
were ready to be sent out into the mail, and
so just like that, they were in business. The seed
(08:16):
money paid off. Now, this gun that they designed together
was inspired by World War Two handguns from the Axis Powers.
It had a similar silhouette appearance of both the Japanese
Namboo and the German Luger. In certain ways, the ergonomics
of those guns were tweaked a little bit to create
(08:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
And when we come back, we'll continue with the story
of Ruger, the Great American Company, and my goodness, how
it got started. It is like how so many companies
got started. I'm the cheap and almost out of business
from the beginning. More of the story of Ruger, the
Great American gun company. After these messages, this is our
American stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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