Influence Without a Workbench: Jack O'Connor and Bill Jordan

Not every person who shapes the custom firearms trade holds a file. Some of them hold a pen. Jack O'Connor and Bill Jordan were both writers, both armed, both deeply opinionated about what a serious working firearm should be — and between the two of them, they drove more demand for custom rifle and revolver work than most shops could keep up with. Neither man was primarily a gunsmith. Both left behind a specification that gunsmiths were still filling long after they were gone.

Jack O'Connor: The Rifle's Advocate

O'Connor was born in Arizona in 1902, taught English and journalism at the University of Arizona, and by the late 1930s had an exclusive contract with Outdoor Life that he would hold for nearly four decades. He was the magazine's Arms and Ammunition Editor from 1941 until his retirement in 1972 — a thirty-year run during which he hunted on three continents, completed four grand slams of North American wild sheep, and wrote about rifles and cartridges with a literary precision that no other gun writer of his era matched.

His platform was the bolt-action sporter. His cartridge was the .270 Winchester. His ideal rifle was the pre-1964 Winchester Model 70, stocked in French walnut, built light for mountain hunting, scoped low, and fitted with a trigger that broke cleanly. He had his personal rifles built by Alvin Biesen of Spokane — a craftsman whose work in fleur-de-lis checkering, precise metal-to-wood inletting, and featherweight stock design became the visual language of the American custom bolt gun. O'Connor described those rifles in print, in detail, for thirty years, and the readers came looking for the same thing.

O'Connor's prolific writing about design features helped influence the direction of lighter, better-stocked rifles — and manufacturers eventually followed where his readers were already pointed.

His famous feud with Elmer Keith over cartridge philosophy — .270 versus the heavy magnums, fast and flat versus heavy and deep — was the most-read argument in American gun writing for decades. It was also, for any smith paying attention, a reliable indicator of exactly what two different customer types were going to walk in and ask for.

Bill Jordan: The Lawman's Standard

Jordan came from a different world entirely. Born in Louisiana in 1911, he spent over thirty years with the U.S. Border Patrol along the Mexico border — interrupted twice by Marine Corps service in World War II and Korea — in an era when that posting reliably involved gunfights. He retired from the Border Patrol as Assistant Chief Patrol Inspector and from the Marine Corps Reserve as a Colonel. He was recorded drawing, firing, and hitting a target in 0.27 of a second with a double-action revolver.

His 1965 book No Second Place Winner sold over 200,000 copies and has never gone out of print. It is one of the most direct books ever written about what a duty revolver needs to do and how a man needs to train to use it.

"Here then are the things that a holster should do: it should hold the gun securely yet allow the maximum speed attainable within the limits of comfort, safety, and security." — Bill Jordan

He designed the Jordan — or Border Patrol — holster in collaboration with S.D. Myres: rigid, form-fitted, forward-canted, with the trigger guard fully exposed and the grip held away from the back of the leather so the trigger finger could enter the guard as the draw began. The design established the functional principles that every subsequent duty holster has had to either adopt or consciously argue against.

He was instrumental in the development of the Smith & Wesson K-frame .357 Magnum, resulting in the Model 19 and Model 66 Combat Magnum — the revolvers that became a standard sidearm for American law enforcement for a generation. He collaborated with Walter Roper on the Jordan Trooper grip, which S&W eventually adopted as factory equipment on its magnums.

What They Share

What O'Connor and Jordan share is the mechanism of influence. Both operated primarily through writing and public reputation rather than through gunsmithing itself. Both translated personal field experience into a published standard that their respective audiences treated as authoritative. And both generated demand for skilled craft work that they could not themselves supply.

The writer who tells readers what the ideal firearm should be has just written the specification. The gunsmith's job is to build it.