Collector Profile

1942 Colt M1911A1 — The Pistol Newt Taylor Left Behind

A Camp Perry story of precision, family, and a Colt built to compete

By Greg Cook · August 25, 2026 · Updated August 28, 2026 · 1911 History

Some historic pistols arrive with a shipping box, a bill of sale, and a tidy chain of ownership. Others come with something harder to catalog: the touch of the person who tuned them, the habits of the shooter who trusted them, and the family stories that explain why they were never merely objects. Newton C. Taylor Jr.'s Colt belongs to the second kind.

The pistol survives as a working record of American service-pistol competition. Its U.S. Property frame, Springfield Armory and Rock Island Arsenal markings, National Match markings, adjustable sights, and fitted components point to a wartime Colt M1911A1 that passed through the government arsenal system and was prepared for serious match use. Its finish is not pristine, and that is precisely the point. The wear, later grips and trigger, acceptance and arsenal marks, and hand-fit parts belong to the life it lived.

The question that opened the story

The history began to surface when Charles Turtzo reached out with a simple request for direction. The 1911 had belonged to his father-in-law, he wrote. Newt had shot at Camp Perry into 1990 or 1991, and the family knew it as his President's Hundred pistol. Charles was not asking what it might sell for. He wanted to know what it was and how its markings fit the story he had inherited.

“I'm only interested in the history of this 1911, not the value. To me, it's priceless.”— Charles Turtzo

The first photographs changed the question. This was not an ordinary commercial National Match or Gold Cup. The U.S. Property frame, Springfield Armory “SA” and Rock Island Arsenal “RIA” markings, National Match stamp, adjustable sights, and numbered fitted components all pointed toward a military service pistol rebuilt for competition. The rubber grips and present three-hole trigger appeared to be later substitutions rather than evidence of the government preparation. Greg asked for Newt's full name, the approximate year of the President's Hundred finish, and close photographs of the hidden and fitted parts. The request was deliberately conservative: do not clean, refinish, or replace parts.

Charles followed the trail himself. The links Greg sent led him to the 1990 Camp Perry results, where he found Newton C. Taylor Jr. in 70th place. Charles reported that Newt was a civilian and later confirmed that Newt was 64 at the time of the 1990 match. Charles also supplied the boxed W.B. acceptance mark, the NM marking on the trigger guard, and partial number fragments beneath the firing-pin stop.

Greg's production-range research placed the Colt in 1942, not 1943, and identified W.B. with Colonel Waldemar S. Broberg, the Army ordnance inspector associated with Colt pistols accepted in that period. At first, the hidden digits were only a possibility: together they might represent the pistol's number, suggesting that the slide and receiver had remained together. More photographs would decide the point.

A National Match pistol, not a showroom Gold Cup

The Taylor pistol is best understood as a service pistol transformed into a competition arm. The frame carries the government property marking and the initials associated with wartime inspection. Its “SA” and “RIA” marks document government arsenal handling, while the National Match mark, target sights, and numbered fitted components support its identification as a government-prepared National Match pistol. The present trigger appears to be a later replacement.

Close inspection adds the more persuasive evidence. Components were numbered to keep fitted parts together, and the barrel, bushing, and slide show the kind of individual attention expected in a government match-prepared pistol. The pistol's serial number is intentionally withheld at the family's request. Identifying numbers in the photographs have likewise been covered without altering the surrounding marks.

When the fitted parts answered

The next group of photographs strengthened the identification. The barrel lug was hand-numbered to the receiver. The fitted bushing carried the same number, and the marks beneath the firing-pin stop were consistent with it as well. What had first looked like unrelated fragments were portions of the serial applied to keep individually fitted components with the pistol. That practice is characteristic of government National Match preparation.

The numbered barrel, bushing, slide, and receiver are consistent with the individual fitting found on government-prepared National Match pistols. Together with the SA and RIA arsenal markings, the evidence supports identifying the Taylor Colt as a government-built National Match pistol, probably one that later entered civilian ownership through the Director of Civilian Marksmanship program. Without its original sales paperwork or an arsenal record, however, the precise sequence and location of the rebuild and match work cannot yet be established.

The pistol no longer remains in its complete government-issued match configuration. Experienced U.S. military pistol collectors identified the rubber grips and three-hole adjustable trigger as later commercial substitutions. Government National Match pistols of this type normally wore fully checkered walnut stocks and a long aluminum trigger. These parts are best interpreted as later personalization rather than evidence of the original arsenal preparation.

The technical finding did not prove by itself that this was the exact pistol Newt fired for his 1990 result, but Charles supplied the missing family testimony: Newt had shown him this specific pistol before his death, and his widow later said Newt wanted Charles to have it.

Camp Perry and the President's Hundred

The pistol's most important connection is not a factory designation but a place: Camp Perry, the Ohio National Guard training site on Lake Erie that has hosted the National Matches since 1907. For generations of pistol shooters, Perry was both proving ground and reunion—a long firing line where preparation, weather, nerves, and friendship met.

Charles remembers that Newt shot at Camp Perry into 1990 or 1991. In the 1990 results Charles located, Newton C. Taylor Jr. appears in 70th place in the President's Pistol Match. Charles confirms that Newt was 64 and competing as a civilian. A top-100 finish placed him in the President's Hundred, one of the most recognizable distinctions in American competitive marksmanship. The award belonged to the shooter, not to a special model of pistol; in family shorthand, however, this understandably became Newt's “President's Hundred pistol.”

That distinction matters because it ties a heavily used match pistol to an identifiable achievement. It also gives the family a sharper picture of Newt late in his competitive life: still traveling to Perry, still willing to stand on the line, and still finishing among the hundred.

The call at Camp Perry

One Camp Perry story captures Newt's temperament in a single scene. This was before cell phones. A call came for him, and he walked to the office with friends in tow. When he hung up, they asked what had happened. His house had burned down, he told them. His companions were ready to pack him up and take him home. Newt refused. He had come to shoot.

What his companions did not know—but Newt did—was that the burned building was not his actual home, but a house he had already planned to demolish. The men offering to take him back were also the shooters he was competing against, a detail that gives the story its final twist.

The pistol that was not in the mix

Before Newt died, he showed this pistol to Charles. When Newt's children later had the opportunity to choose a 1911, this one was not among the available guns. Only afterward did Charles's mother-in-law give it to him and explain that Newt had wanted him to have it.

Charles then waited more than ten years before firing it. He knew what the pistol had represented in Newt's hands and felt, as he put it, that he could not live up to the gun's potential. That hesitation says more about inheritance than any appraisal can. The pistol carried an expectation, and Charles answered it first with restraint: no refinishing, no polishing away the evidence, only oil and a return to the safe.

A teacher with a screwdriver

The match pistol was only one part of Newt's life with handguns. When Charles turned 21, in 1986 or shortly afterward, he bought his first Colt, a 1911 Officer's Model, and carried it over to show his father-in-law. Within five minutes, Newt had it apart and was correcting what he considered an intolerable amount of trigger creep. Then they went downstairs to the 25-yard range in the basement.

The basement range was only one of Newt's arrangements. At the same time, he installed a separate bullet trap in the hallway and concealed it behind a picture. Charles's mother-in-law discovered it when the frame did not sit quite right. Charles jokes that the discovery cost Newt a new car for his wife.

In summer, the practice moved outside in miniature. Pennsylvania carpenter bees would stop and hover near the porch. Newt sat with a Daisy BB gun and tried to catch them in that brief pause. The image is less a marksmanship lesson than a portrait of constant attention: he watched, waited, and took the shot when the target held still.

The Gold Cup at Christmas

One Christmas morning, after the children had finished opening presents, the conversation returned to guns. Charles mentioned that his friend Roger had bought a Gold Cup and said what a fine pistol it was. Newt walked into his office, returned with a Gold Cup of his own, and handed it over: if Charles liked Gold Cups, here was one for him. It was not perfect, Newt said, but it could shoot. Then he taught Charles to reload.

Another family pistol arrived by a different route. When Charles showed his Officer's Model to an uncle, an aunt mentioned that she had one too—a pistol that had belonged to Charles's grandfather, a First World War veteran. Thirty-five years later, a cousin gave it to Charles. It now rests in the safe with the other family treasures.

Aunt Sue's Winchester

A separate story from Charles's own side of the family concerns a gun absent from the photographs. Charles remembers finding his Aunt Sue seated on the porch with a .22, waiting for a groundhog to enter the garden. When he admired the rifle and asked where it had come from, she answered with a piece of Prohibition-era family history. Charles's grandfather had operated a still. One customer came for whiskey without money, left the rifle as collateral, and never returned for it.

Charles remembers the gun as an old Winchester fitted with a small tang-mounted peep sight. He wishes he had a photograph, but the story preserves what a picture could not: how an unpaid whiskey debt became a family rifle and, years later, a quiet garden gun.

What the metal keeps

The temptation with an old competition pistol is to treat every mark as a clue to be decoded and every part as evidence in a technical case. That work matters. It documents government arsenal work, later National Match preparation, how the pistol was fit, and why it belongs to the National Match tradition. Yet the Taylor Colt carries a second archive that cannot be stamped into steel.

It keeps the memory of a man who stayed at Camp Perry when friends thought he should go home; who could not leave a new trigger alone; who built a basement range and concealed a second bullet trap behind a hallway picture; who handed a Gold Cup to his son-in-law on Christmas morning; and who made sure one particular pistol passed to the person he had chosen.

Around that central memory, Charles is preserving stories from his own wider family as well—from a First World War pistol returned to him decades later to Aunt Sue's Prohibition-era Winchester.

That is why the right measure of this Colt is not a price range. Its value lies in the connection between a documented shooting tradition and the small stories that make one competitor knowable. Preserved together—pistol, photographs, match result, and family recollections—they form the history Charles wanted to recover.

Photographic record

The supplied photo record is shown below. The strongest and most distinct views appear at larger size throughout the article. All visible identifying numbers have been covered. The group photograph includes Charles's modern Springfield at far right; it is unrelated to Newt's Colt.

About Greg Cook

Greg Cook writes about firearms collecting, personal history, and the stories behind interesting guns. His Army MOS was 76Y, Unit Armorer, and he brings that practical background to his collector articles.