Stuck Cleaning Patches!!!!!

[Rapier]

That is interesting Adam, had almost the exact thing happen to me. Lady stopped by my store years ago. Had a towel rolled up in her hands, I could see a brown holster with a swivel top sticking out of the towel. She walks up and asks if I wanted to buy a gun, the guys in a pawn shop down the road, sent her to me. She had a disassembled brand new Colt C prefix 1911 made in 1917, in pieces in the towel, missing a barrel. But with three clips with lanyard loops, multi colored and a like new Calvary holster, never oiled. So I asked her what do you want for it. She said the guys down the road said it was worth $170, she said I will take that for it, I just reached for my wallet.

There was a gun show acquaintance in Dothan, AL that had about a million dollars worth of new, old stock, gun parts. So I got up with him, you got a new 1911 barrel, not an A1, a 1911. Yep believe I do, he goes in the back, returns in a few minutes with a barrel wrapped in original tan paper, how much, $68. Away I went with an as new 1911 commercial. Sold that gun 3 months later to a 1911 collector, he was tickled to get it and I was tickled for him to get it.....

He got a piece of history: A 1917 graduate of Yale, joined the US Army as an officer, bought the gun as part of his uniform, was on Pershing's staff as a cavalry officer, transferred to the Marine Corps at the end of the war and was assigned to the guard detail that accompanied the Kaiser when the Kaiser went into exile after the war ended.
Ed