A LEGACY OF KNOWLEDGE
From top: In-house printing; the Monte Theatre location, and a view from its balcony; Brownells HQ, circa 1977; a mail run, 1950s; pallets on loading docks, 1970s; the modern office; assembling clay pigeon throwers.
Bob began carrying hardto-find parts and tools for gunsmiths. “He couldn’t find what he wanted,” says Frank, “and so he figured other people couldn’t, either.” He set up a small sales brochure and began taking mail-order sales from around the country, acting as middleman between buyers and manufacturers. He’d also create some of his own specialized tools for gunsmiths, finding them through other gunsmiths or making them himself. “His brain was always thinking of how to do it better, how to communicate it better,” says Pete Brownell, Frank’s son, Bob’s grandson, and current CEO of Brownells. One such innovation was glass bedding, a process that bonds the uneven surfaces of a gun’s action to its stock. It had been used in other industries, but it was Bob Brownell who brought it to gunsmithing. “He came up with the packaging and the name, and ballyhooed the hell out of it,” says Frank. “It became a staple of the industry.” Meanwhile, Bob was also pursuing a writing career, penning a column in American Rifleman called “The Jack Leg Journal,” among other endeavors. And the business itself kept moving—from the furnace room of a bakery to the basement of a Masonic hall to a rehabbed old movie theater. “All of this time, he kept finding these new products,” says Frank. “In a really great year, there might be eight or 10 new products. I grew up following him around—learning to hunt, learning to fish, and getting involved in the business.” Frank was far from the only person Bob taught. “Grandpa wanted to professionalize the gunsmithing trade,” says Pete. One of the ways he did this was through his gunsmithing newsletter, called Gunsmith Kinks. Packed
with tips and information, mechanical and otherwise, the newsletters have been collected into four large volumes, the first one published in 1968. “He loved to write,” says Frank. “He was a journalist at heart.” Collecting techniques from his customers and passing them on via the newsletter, Bob Brownell was crowdsourcing before it was cool. Another Brownells publication, 1959’s Encyclopedia of Modern Firearms, was a breakout hit. The book consisted of exploded manufacturers’ diagrams of all guns in production, with descriptions of every piece, as well as information from military firearms manuals. “Our buyer ordered three of every gun part,” says Frank. “Screws, springs, pins, all the stuff that held them together. Then he measured all of those, and wrote down the average. Nobody had that kind of accuracy in those days.” “That was probably the one book that we did that really defined Brownells as the information source to the gunsmithing trade,” says Pete. “Because it gave all the gunsmiths out there the kind of information they needed to be successful. And then we started to layer on more and more information about being a good gunsmith. It was information like that that we’ve had as a mandate in the marketplace for the past 60, 70 years.” In the meantime, the parts and tools business blossomed. “In the early days we’d add maybe 10 new products in a year,” says Frank. Under his stewardship, Brownells began to carry more and more new products. “Today we’re looking at 2,500 to 3,000 every year”—all of them backed by Brownells’ original moneyback guarantee. “Dad liked the products he selected well enough that if
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