Letter from Chip Northrup

New Spin on ‘It Takes a Village’

Not long after we moved to the village, we realized that Cooperstown is a matriarchy and that the preferred sport of the matriarchs is wing-shooting. The late, great Bunny Hamilton introduced us to Anne Logan, the grand dame of the town, who asked me if I shot. “I do,” I replied, “bolt action .30-06 Remington with a 4 power scope.” Wrong answer.

Mrs. Logan was a world class clay shooter. Shortly thereafter I discovered the Cooperstown Sportsmen’s Club, where the devotees of the sport shoot on Sunday morning when everyone else is in church, asleep or mowing their lawns. The matriarchs make an annual pilgrimage to the Orvis Shooting School in Vermont. Friends that shoot together stay together—and scrupulously avoid heated arguments.

Brothers Randy and Jerry Selan offered to try to teach me how to shoot clays. I brought an old Browning over/under up from the ranch and made a go of it. Since you learn how to lead the clay by missing—a lot—it occurred to me that you could display the lead in virtual reality and see the lead. We showed the prototype to Lucy Townsend, who told us we needed to show eye dominance, which we did. Oliver Horvath tried it and asked, “Where’s the smoke?” So we added gun smoke.

With encouragement from the Marines Goodwill Ambassador to Cooperstown, Robert Poulson, this idea evolved into a virtual reality shooting system that we built to teach Marines how to shoot moving targets. Since drones are now the number one killer on the battlefield, the Marines can use the simulator to learn how to hit drones with shotguns. With correct eye dominance and gun smoke of course, courtesy of the good folks of Cooperstown. It takes a village to shoot down a drone.

Chip Northrup
Cooperstown