“My mom would be the one that would take down the names at the front door,” he said. “There was an open area down there right next to the rifle range that we would go in and play around until our names were called,” he said.Ĭourses were held for several weeks each year, and Cartmill’s family was heavily involved. James Cartmill wasn’t yet 10 years old when he started taking gun safety classes through Territorial Sportsmen in the early 1970s. “But I was a little disappointed when I found out later that the way to get your ‘distinguished’ was to get special time at the gun range, and that wasn’t readily available to women at that time,” she said.īut the high school rifle club wasn’t the only organization to use the Harborview gun range. Karleen Grummett (then Karleen Alstead) saved this certificate from her time in the Juneau High School rifle club in the late 1950s. “At the end of the year, you were awarded some brass bars that you put on a pin on your high school sweater.”Ĭlub members could work their way up to “expert” or “distinguished” levels, and Grummett was proud to achieve the expert title. “There were certain goals for each of those positions,” she said. The girls would start in the prone position and work up to sitting, kneeling and standing. “It was really noisy down there in that basement, with all the guns going off. “That didn’t happen, but we still had a lot of fun,” Grummett said. The 1974-1975 high school rifle club as pictured in the yearbook. She joined the group hoping that if she could properly handle a gun, her father would take her hunting. “It was in the basement of the Harborview school.” “It was just assumed that that’s where you went to learn how to shoot a rifle,” she said. Grummett participated in the club from 1958 until 1960, when she graduated from what was then Juneau High School (not yet Juneau-Douglas High School). “They had both boys’ and girls’ rifle clubs, and they were both very well attended.” “Rifle club was one of the more common groups to join in high school, and it sounded like fun to me,” she said. You’ll also find the rifle club, which was founded in 1934. įlipping through decades of Juneau’s high school yearbooks, you’ll find some dated extracurriculars, like candy stripers and the Future Homemakers of America. It was there for decades, and there are plenty of people still around in Juneau who remember it. (Courtesy of Karleen Grummett)Īs part of KTOO’s Curious Juneau project, a listener asked: “Was there really a gun range in the basement of Harborview Elementary School?” The 1958-1959 girls’ high school rifle club poses for a yearbook photo in the basement of Harborview.
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