February 19, 2024 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Ruger is the biggest gun manufacturer in the U.S., and it’s not by accident. Here to tell this story is Logan Metesh. Logan is a firearms historian and museum professional who runs High Caliber History LLC.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue here on our American stories. Bruger 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 and 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 an 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
(05:00):
potential as a designer, and Smith and Wesson offered him
a job for seventy five dollars a week, which was
a nice paybomp, 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
(05:22):
with Auto Ordinance. So Bill went over to 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,
(05:45):
Bill had gone into business for himself. 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 all industrial parts, and
also he was working on his design for a twenty
two caliber pistol. But unfortunately, like I'd mentioned earlier on,
(06:09):
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 Stem
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
(06:50):
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 which just happened to be firearms.
Adding to the oddity that is the life of Alexander Sturn.
This well bred young man served during World War Two
(07:11):
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
(07:31):
Red Barn, across the street from a 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
(07:53):
and they were out of cash, and he told Alex,
he said, this is the last bit of money for
the original 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,
(08:15):
they were in business. The seed 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 Nambo and the
German Luger. In certain ways, the ergonomics of those guns
were tweaked a little bit to create what would become
(08:37):
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 with our American stories and
(09:42):
the story of Ruger the great American arms manufacturer right
here in the United States. Let's continue with this great
business story.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
There's a joke in the gun community that God came
to Bill Ruger in a dream and showed him the
design for the Ruger Standard Pistol, but unfortunately a Bill
woke up before God could tell him how to put
it back together. Anyway, when the gun was first put
into production and they were working on things, they had
(10:11):
a total of eight barreled pistol receivers that they had
made as test guns for this new design, and serial
number three of these guns was actually the first one
to leave the factory. Serial numbers one and two were
retained internally for further study. A February of nineteen fifty, Stern,
Ruger and Company had a back order of an astounding
(10:34):
five thousand units and a production capacity of just nine
hundred guns a month. By summer of the same year,
the backlog had grown to nine thousand units and their
production capacity had picked up a little bit, but they
were still only able to make one thousand guns a month.
That backlog is a testament to that little gun's rugged
(10:55):
design and its ease of use and its affordability. Finally,
fine there was a twenty two caliber pistol on the
market that anyone could afford to own, and that was
easy enough for anyone to learn how to shoot with
this gun. Within a year, that little startup company from
Connecticut had gained traction and continued to advance at a
(11:17):
rapid pace. But Alex Stern contracted viral hepatitis and died
very unexpectedly in November of nineteen fifty one. He was
just twenty eight years old. The company's heraldic eagle logo
that today is instantly recognizable as Ruger. That eagle was
(11:39):
actually designed by Alex Stern, and so paying homage to
his fallen business partner, Bill Ruger, changed the color of
the eagle in the logo from red to black, and
with the exception of the one million Ruger standard pistol
that they produced in nineteen seventy nine, it wasn't until
(12:00):
nineteen ninety nine with the celebration of their fiftieth anniversary,
that the logo would return to red on all of
their guns. So even though they had the tremendous setback
of Alex Stern passing away unexpectedly at a very young age,
Bill Ruger was a shrewd businessman and he didn't want
to rest on their laurels and be seen as one
(12:21):
trick pony, So he knew that they were going to
have to diversify their offerings beyond that twenty two caliber pistol.
Given the popularity of westerns and cowboys six guns in
the nineteen fifties, the Ruger Company introduced their first single
action revolver in nineteen fifty three. The revolver was a
(12:42):
instant success, and the company introduced the Single six, the Blackhawk,
and the Bearcat, all of which were single action revolvers
all by the end of that decade, and each one
of them was a hit. Next up rifles, so the
deer Stalker, the ten twenty two, the Number one one,
the Model seventy seven, and so on. We're all added
(13:03):
to the lineup in the nineteen sixties, and due to
the brand's success and popularity. The company became publicly traded
for the first time in nineteen sixty nine. It would
go on to be listed on the New York Stock
Exchange in nineteen ninety. But today it remains the only
American arms manufacturer that is publicly traded as a standalone
(13:25):
entity and not grouped into a larger parent organization. So
they're flying high. By the end of nineteen sixty nine,
they've been in business twenty years, and now it's time
for a flop. But it wasn't a gun. Bill Ruger
collected high end antique automobiles, and so in that vein
(13:46):
he designed what was known as the Ruger Sports Tourer,
which was a car based on the Bentley and it
had an estimated retail price of twelve to thirteen thousand dollars.
Bill read the market wrong with the car, and that
was kind of a rare occurrence for him. He usually
was a keen eye and knew what people wanted. But
(14:06):
they did not want this car, so they'd only made
two of them when they turned their focus back to
making guns. Unfortunately, they'd already spent eight years and four
hundred thousand dollars developing a car that never made it
to production. Nonetheless, when they turned their attention back to guns,
they did well in the seventies. By nineteen seventy nine,
(14:29):
which was the company's thirtieth anniversary, for the models they
offered had already sold a million units each, and they
finished up their thirtieth anniversary with sales totaling sixty eight
point eight million dollars and a profit of seven point
nine million, which was up like fourteen percent over the
previous year alone. So by nineteen eighty nine, and at
(14:51):
this point in American history, the idea of a so
called assault weapons ban was really picking up steam, and
so Bill Rue wrote a letter to every member of
Congress and he told them that they should limit magazine
capacity instead of trying to ban these so called assault weapons.
Taking it a step further in a couple more years,
(15:14):
he would sit down with NBC in nineteen ninety two,
and in that interview he was quoted as saying that
no honest man needs more than ten rounds in any gun,
and backlash against Bill and the company was swift. Gun
owners as a whole have very long memories, and there
are still some people to this day that will not
(15:36):
own a Ruger firearm because of what Bill said. Fortunately
for them, they make a good product and there were
enough people who still rallied around the brand, and they
found themselves in nineteen ninety nine celebrating their fiftieth anniversary,
and by that point in time they had really cemented
their place both in firearms history and in American history.
(16:00):
Quite literally, tens of millions of gun owners had Ruger
firearms in the field, hunting, sitting in their home gun safes,
out on the range with their kids, sitting in the
gun rack, in their trucks. You know, Ruger firearms were everywhere.
And over the years, Bill Ruger had the opportunity to
buy a whole bunch of other companies. Even if you
(16:21):
don't know firearms, you still know names like Colt Smith
and Wesson, Remington, and Winchester. He had the opportunity to
buy all of those companies and didn't. And it wasn't
just gun companies. Beyond that, he had the opportunity to
buy both Maserati, the sports car company, and Harley Davidson,
the iconic motorcycle company. Instead, he chose to focus on
(16:45):
his guns. By two thousand, Bill was eighty four years
old and he decided it was finally time to retire. Now,
retirement was kind of an odd thing for Bill. In
nineteen ninety two, he did an interview with Forbes magazine
when he told him that he could never retire because
he'd never done a god day's work in his life,
(17:08):
So how can you retire if you've never worked. Nonetheless,
he did retire and his son took over as chairman
and CEO of the company. Bill had also said around
that same time that if you rest, you rust, and
so that's why he tried to keep so active, and
unfortunately retirement meant rest, and it meant rust. So Bill
(17:31):
Ruger died in two thousand and two, having spent fifty
three years involved in the operations of the company that
he helped found, and his son, Bill Ruger Junior, passed
away in twenty eighteen after working for his father's company
for forty two years. He retired in two thousand and six,
and so, even though there's been no direct Ruger descendant
(17:53):
running the company in more than a decade, they are
definitely one of the big players on the block in
turn of American firearms. The Ruger standard pistol that they
initially created back in nineteen forty nine, lives on today
in a variant known as the Mark four, and like
the previous three versions, it maintains all the classic appeal
(18:16):
and lines of the standard, but it just kind of
updates the platform for today's market. Most importantly, however, it
solves the difficulty of takedown and reassembly. So now that
Bill Ruger is spending all of his time up above
with God, he was finally able to have God show
him how to put the pistol back together. And so
(18:36):
now that the Mark four has ironed out all the
kinks in the design, the gun can remain at the
forefront as an incredibly popular gun for people to learn
how to shoot on both young and old, beginner and
seasoned pros alike. The humble startup that consisted of just
a few guys in a red barn now has more
(18:57):
than eighteen hundred employees, still headquartered in Connecticut, but now
they've got five factories throughout the country. Alexander Sturm's fifty
thousand dollars investment really paid off. The company today is
worth nine hundred and forty million dollars, and given their success,
I think it's safe to say that mister Sturm and
(19:19):
mister Ruger would have big smiles on their faces if
they could see where their company is at today.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
And a very special thanks to Logan Metish. Logan is
a firearms historian, a museum professional who runs High Caliber
History LLC. And my goodness, what a story. Eighteen hundred
employees off a fifty thousand dollars loan. Two guys just well,
never working a minute in their lives, they probably felt.
And so many people who work for themselves that's why
(19:46):
they do it because they have something special they want
to do. And my goodness, anyone who owns weapons, who
loves firearms and responsible firearm ownership is a big deal.
But he testified and went public on magazine capacity, My goodness,
I took a lot of courage to do and he
did it. Ruger, the great American gun manufacturer. Their story
(20:10):
here on our American Stories
And we continue here on our American stories. Bruger 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 and 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 an 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
(05:00):
potential as a designer, and Smith and Wesson offered him
a job for seventy five dollars a week, which was
a nice paybomp, 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
(05:22):
with Auto Ordinance. So Bill went over to 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,
(05:45):
Bill had gone into business for himself. 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 all industrial parts, and
also he was working on his design for a twenty
two caliber pistol. But unfortunately, like I'd mentioned earlier on,
(06:09):
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 Stem
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
(06:50):
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 which just happened to be firearms.
Adding to the oddity that is the life of Alexander Sturn.
This well bred young man served during World War Two
(07:11):
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
(07:31):
Red Barn, across the street from a 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
(07:53):
and they were out of cash, and he told Alex,
he said, this is the last bit of money for
the original 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,
(08:15):
they were in business. The seed 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 Nambo and the
German Luger. In certain ways, the ergonomics of those guns
were tweaked a little bit to create what would become
(08:37):
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 with our American stories and
(09:42):
the story of Ruger the great American arms manufacturer right
here in the United States. Let's continue with this great
business story.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
There's a joke in the gun community that God came
to Bill Ruger in a dream and showed him the
design for the Ruger Standard Pistol, but unfortunately a Bill
woke up before God could tell him how to put
it back together. Anyway, when the gun was first put
into production and they were working on things, they had
(10:11):
a total of eight barreled pistol receivers that they had
made as test guns for this new design, and serial
number three of these guns was actually the first one
to leave the factory. Serial numbers one and two were
retained internally for further study. A February of nineteen fifty, Stern,
Ruger and Company had a back order of an astounding
(10:34):
five thousand units and a production capacity of just nine
hundred guns a month. By summer of the same year,
the backlog had grown to nine thousand units and their
production capacity had picked up a little bit, but they
were still only able to make one thousand guns a month.
That backlog is a testament to that little gun's rugged
(10:55):
design and its ease of use and its affordability. Finally,
fine there was a twenty two caliber pistol on the
market that anyone could afford to own, and that was
easy enough for anyone to learn how to shoot with
this gun. Within a year, that little startup company from
Connecticut had gained traction and continued to advance at a
(11:17):
rapid pace. But Alex Stern contracted viral hepatitis and died
very unexpectedly in November of nineteen fifty one. He was
just twenty eight years old. The company's heraldic eagle logo
that today is instantly recognizable as Ruger. That eagle was
(11:39):
actually designed by Alex Stern, and so paying homage to
his fallen business partner, Bill Ruger, changed the color of
the eagle in the logo from red to black, and
with the exception of the one million Ruger standard pistol
that they produced in nineteen seventy nine, it wasn't until
(12:00):
nineteen ninety nine with the celebration of their fiftieth anniversary,
that the logo would return to red on all of
their guns. So even though they had the tremendous setback
of Alex Stern passing away unexpectedly at a very young age,
Bill Ruger was a shrewd businessman and he didn't want
to rest on their laurels and be seen as one
(12:21):
trick pony, So he knew that they were going to
have to diversify their offerings beyond that twenty two caliber pistol.
Given the popularity of westerns and cowboys six guns in
the nineteen fifties, the Ruger Company introduced their first single
action revolver in nineteen fifty three. The revolver was a
(12:42):
instant success, and the company introduced the Single six, the Blackhawk,
and the Bearcat, all of which were single action revolvers
all by the end of that decade, and each one
of them was a hit. Next up rifles, so the
deer Stalker, the ten twenty two, the Number one one,
the Model seventy seven, and so on. We're all added
(13:03):
to the lineup in the nineteen sixties, and due to
the brand's success and popularity. The company became publicly traded
for the first time in nineteen sixty nine. It would
go on to be listed on the New York Stock
Exchange in nineteen ninety. But today it remains the only
American arms manufacturer that is publicly traded as a standalone
(13:25):
entity and not grouped into a larger parent organization. So
they're flying high. By the end of nineteen sixty nine,
they've been in business twenty years, and now it's time
for a flop. But it wasn't a gun. Bill Ruger
collected high end antique automobiles, and so in that vein
(13:46):
he designed what was known as the Ruger Sports Tourer,
which was a car based on the Bentley and it
had an estimated retail price of twelve to thirteen thousand dollars.
Bill read the market wrong with the car, and that
was kind of a rare occurrence for him. He usually
was a keen eye and knew what people wanted. But
(14:06):
they did not want this car, so they'd only made
two of them when they turned their focus back to
making guns. Unfortunately, they'd already spent eight years and four
hundred thousand dollars developing a car that never made it
to production. Nonetheless, when they turned their attention back to guns,
they did well in the seventies. By nineteen seventy nine,
(14:29):
which was the company's thirtieth anniversary, for the models they
offered had already sold a million units each, and they
finished up their thirtieth anniversary with sales totaling sixty eight
point eight million dollars and a profit of seven point
nine million, which was up like fourteen percent over the
previous year alone. So by nineteen eighty nine, and at
(14:51):
this point in American history, the idea of a so
called assault weapons ban was really picking up steam, and
so Bill Rue wrote a letter to every member of
Congress and he told them that they should limit magazine
capacity instead of trying to ban these so called assault weapons.
Taking it a step further in a couple more years,
(15:14):
he would sit down with NBC in nineteen ninety two,
and in that interview he was quoted as saying that
no honest man needs more than ten rounds in any gun,
and backlash against Bill and the company was swift. Gun
owners as a whole have very long memories, and there
are still some people to this day that will not
(15:36):
own a Ruger firearm because of what Bill said. Fortunately
for them, they make a good product and there were
enough people who still rallied around the brand, and they
found themselves in nineteen ninety nine celebrating their fiftieth anniversary,
and by that point in time they had really cemented
their place both in firearms history and in American history.
(16:00):
Quite literally, tens of millions of gun owners had Ruger
firearms in the field, hunting, sitting in their home gun safes,
out on the range with their kids, sitting in the
gun rack, in their trucks. You know, Ruger firearms were everywhere.
And over the years, Bill Ruger had the opportunity to
buy a whole bunch of other companies. Even if you
(16:21):
don't know firearms, you still know names like Colt Smith
and Wesson, Remington, and Winchester. He had the opportunity to
buy all of those companies and didn't. And it wasn't
just gun companies. Beyond that, he had the opportunity to
buy both Maserati, the sports car company, and Harley Davidson,
the iconic motorcycle company. Instead, he chose to focus on
(16:45):
his guns. By two thousand, Bill was eighty four years
old and he decided it was finally time to retire. Now,
retirement was kind of an odd thing for Bill. In
nineteen ninety two, he did an interview with Forbes magazine
when he told him that he could never retire because
he'd never done a god day's work in his life,
(17:08):
So how can you retire if you've never worked. Nonetheless,
he did retire and his son took over as chairman
and CEO of the company. Bill had also said around
that same time that if you rest, you rust, and
so that's why he tried to keep so active, and
unfortunately retirement meant rest, and it meant rust. So Bill
(17:31):
Ruger died in two thousand and two, having spent fifty
three years involved in the operations of the company that
he helped found, and his son, Bill Ruger Junior, passed
away in twenty eighteen after working for his father's company
for forty two years. He retired in two thousand and six,
and so, even though there's been no direct Ruger descendant
(17:53):
running the company in more than a decade, they are
definitely one of the big players on the block in
turn of American firearms. The Ruger standard pistol that they
initially created back in nineteen forty nine, lives on today
in a variant known as the Mark four, and like
the previous three versions, it maintains all the classic appeal
(18:16):
and lines of the standard, but it just kind of
updates the platform for today's market. Most importantly, however, it
solves the difficulty of takedown and reassembly. So now that
Bill Ruger is spending all of his time up above
with God, he was finally able to have God show
him how to put the pistol back together. And so
(18:36):
now that the Mark four has ironed out all the
kinks in the design, the gun can remain at the
forefront as an incredibly popular gun for people to learn
how to shoot on both young and old, beginner and
seasoned pros alike. The humble startup that consisted of just
a few guys in a red barn now has more
(18:57):
than eighteen hundred employees, still headquartered in Connecticut, but now
they've got five factories throughout the country. Alexander Sturm's fifty
thousand dollars investment really paid off. The company today is
worth nine hundred and forty million dollars, and given their success,
I think it's safe to say that mister Sturm and
(19:19):
mister Ruger would have big smiles on their faces if
they could see where their company is at today.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
And a very special thanks to Logan Metish. Logan is
a firearms historian, a museum professional who runs High Caliber
History LLC. And my goodness, what a story. Eighteen hundred
employees off a fifty thousand dollars loan. Two guys just well,
never working a minute in their lives, they probably felt.
And so many people who work for themselves that's why
(19:46):
they do it because they have something special they want
to do. And my goodness, anyone who owns weapons, who
loves firearms and responsible firearm ownership is a big deal.
But he testified and went public on magazine capacity, My goodness,
I took a lot of courage to do and he
did it. Ruger, the great American gun manufacturer. Their story
(20:10):
here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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