Ice water splashed over the sizzling gun barrel as the woman tried to cool her shotgun down. She’d been shooting for more than two hours. On this cool November day in Montgomery, Alabama, she was sweating. Her arms ached from holding the seven-and-a-half-pound Winchester. But the clay pigeons kept coming, whirling out of the trap machine like flying saucers from hell. Crack. Crack. Crack. One by one she pulverized them, the shards joining the layer of remains from the 950-odd pigeons she’d already dispatched.
The spectators at the gun club that day in 1916 couldn’t take their eyes off her. Thirty-four-year-old Elizabeth “Plinky” Toepperwein was America’s only female professional trapshooter (one who shoots at clay pigeons launched into the air by a trap machine). She traveled the country for Winchester, giving trick-shooting exhibitions with her equally famous husband. Some watchers had placed bets on whether she would accomplish her goal: beating a 1904 endurance-shooting record by hitting more than 965 of 1,000 clay pigeons launched from regulation traps. No woman except Plinky had ever shot at a thousand clays in a single session. She’d tried to break the record once already, in 1908, but had fallen four targets short.
With just a few dozen more pigeons to go, Plinky grimaced. Despite the frequent pours of ice water, the barrel was still too hot—a blister was forming on her right hand. The same thing had happened eight years ago. She set her lips, her face determined beneath a halo of curly red hair. She pulled the trigger again.
“History will never forget Annie Oakley,” a trapshooting columnist once wrote, “nor will [it] likely remember Elizabeth Servaty.” Born in Germany in 1882, the woman who would become known as Plinky Toepperwein grew up in America in the years when Oakley, as part of Buffalo Bill’s traveling Wild West show, was shooting her way into the history books. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Plinky would take up Oakley’s mantle as the best female sharpshooter of her generation. By then, guns had begun to lose the romantic luster of their association with the taming of the West. The trick-shooting landscape was becoming commercialized, with gun manufacturers sending sharpshooters on tour to demonstrate and sell their products. Plinky and her husband, Adolph Toepperwein, were the best of the best, performing together across the country for nearly forty years. Along the way, Plinky broke Oakley’s accuracy record, beat countless men in competition, and set new records of her own.
It all started with a teenager who was, Plinky would later recall, “mortally afraid of firearms.” Elizabeth Servaty’s parents had brought her from Germany to New Haven, Connecticut, when she was a year old. The children in the family eventually numbered eleven—Elizabeth was the fourth, and one of only three girls—and money was tight. By nineteen, despite her distaste for weapons, Elizabeth was working as a cartridge loader at the local Winchester Repeating Arms Company plant.
Meanwhile, across the country, a 31-year-old Texan named Adolph Toepperwein had also been hired by Winchester. “Ad,” a nationally renowned sharpshooter from San Antonio, had been enlisted as a traveling salesman, though he’d soon be promoted to an exhibition shooter, touring the nation and giving free trick-shooting performances with Winchester guns and ammo. Winchester sent him to visit the New Haven factory and headquarters in 1901, and he met Elizabeth while strolling the New Haven Green. “I spotted this bright-looking redhead right away, and she seemed to notice me, too,” he later said. “You know Texans—when we notice something special we go for it hard.” They wed in 1903, two weeks shy of Elizabeth’s twenty-first birthday.
Lizzie, as Ad called her, promptly traded leafy New Haven for the broiling heat of San Antonio. Seeing how much her husband loved his job, she asked him to teach her to shoot. She advanced quickly, and by the time Ad began throwing tin cans into the air for her to target, she was hooked on the endless variables and intricacies of sharpshooting. “Throw up another one,” she said, “and I’ll plink it!” Elizabeth Servaty, the timid New Haven girl, was gone. Plinky Toepperwein, the woman who would become the best female sharpshooter of her time, had arrived.
To the horror of Ad’s family, Plinky was soon shooting crayons out of her husband’s hands and chalk from his lips—and she didn’t let motherhood get in the way of her newfound passion, continuing to hone her skills while pregnant and after giving birth to her son, Lawrence, in early 1904. Two months later, Ad brought Plinky to a gig at the St. Louis World’s Fair, where she smashed 967 of 1,000 clay disks with a rifle, beating Annie Oakley’s record of 943 similarly sized glass balls.
Plinky next set her sights on the 1906 national marksmen’s qualifier in Sea Girt, New Jersey. Any shooter who scored high enough in the competition would earn a medal and be added to the list of names in the U.S. War Department’s national marksmen’s reserve. A woman had never competed, and in the sea of drab suits, Plinky’s floor-length dress stood out. Officials debated whether to admit her, but in the end, they could find no rule barring women. Plinky shouldered a military-issue Krag and began to work her way through the stages: Two hundred yards, standing. Three hundred yards, sitting. Five hundred yards, prone. On that stage, Plinky worried about the men staring at her skirts as she lay on the ground, but she went through with it—and, against a backdrop of sand dunes fronting the Atlantic Ocean, became the first woman to qualify for the marksmen’s reserve.
From then on, Plinky was unstoppable. Winchester hired her to tour with Ad and the company’s other professional shooters. Billed as “the Wonderful Topperweins” (Winchester dropped the first e in Toepperwein), Ad and Plinky zipped across the country in trains, stopping in dozens of towns and cities to set up a table of Winchester rifles and wow spectators with their “fancy shooting.” In the days before television or air-conditioning, hundreds of men in suits—and a few women, decked out in Victorian-era dresses and corsets—braved heat and cold to watch Plinky shoot shotgun shells off Ad’s fingers and Ad hit a bull’s-eye while standing on his head. Crowds loved to see Plinky “peel” a potato, held by Ad, by chipping it away with bullets. After each show, there was usually a trap shoot that pitted Plinky (Ad almost never did trap shoots) against the local men. On the occasions when Plinky didn’t win, she was never far from the top.
Not everyone liked the idea of a woman who could outshoot men. Plinky was denied entrance to the Grand American, the biggest competition in the trapshooting world, early in her career, and skepticism also came from closer to home. “My friends all tried to get me to quit,” she recalled in 1930. “ ‘Going out and shooting against men!’ . . . ‘Ladies don’t do such things.’ ” Plinky disagreed. “I told my friends just to watch me, and they would see a woman who could shoot against men and still remain a lady.”
She made good on that promise. Plinky performed in petticoats and refused to shoot live birds (“I could never bring myself to the point of leveling a gun against the innocent little things,” she said in 1906). She was modest—sometimes astonishingly so. “When I get a lot of compliments from the men, I appreciate them, but think it is all due to my husband’s work,” she said after her famous 1906 marksmen’s shoot. An article from the following year depicted a woman treading carefully over the shards of the glass ceilings she’d broken: “I enjoy shooting at tournaments, but never appear unless my husband is with me. In fact, I don’t think I could shoot at all if he were not near.”
Plinky continued to smoke the competition, though inequities persisted. Usually, when she won a tournament that had a monetary prize, the payment went to the top male professional shooter instead, even though Plinky had beaten him. This sexism was thinly justified by the argument that there was no professional women’s division for Plinky to win. “But I don’t mind a little thing like that,” she said. “I have always been shooting against men, with nothing to look forward to but a good score, while the men were shooting for the money.”
By the 1910s, Plinky had become the first woman to hit a hundred straight clay pigeons (a feat she would eventually repeat about two hundred times). The decade became a whirlwind montage: A 31-city tour in 34 days. Summer residencies amid the salt spray and fish smells of Atlantic City’s Million Dollar Pier. Ad throwing five eggs into the air at once, and Plinky “scrambling” them before they hit the ground. Ad shooting bullet “pictures” of Indian heads into sheets of tin. Ad holding playing cards, and Plinky splitting them with a revolver—edgewise.
Ad and Plinky were inseparable, and they played up their romance for the crowds. They’d often kiss during their routines, shocking early audiences. At one 1913 shoot, after Plinky broke 99 of 100 clay pigeons at a gun range, “her hubby came bouncing out of the club house,” a reporter recounted. Ad took off his hat and bowed. “Mrs. Top raised herself on tip-toe, puckered up her lips, and implanted one osculatory embrace plunk on her husband’s mouth. The bashful marksmen around turned their heads.”
Plinky was no longer the shy, demure woman she’d been at the beginning of her career. Once in 1909, a fellow sharpshooter played a prank on her with a trick camera, out of which popped a nine-foot-long fake snake. She let him know exactly how she felt. “What she said . . . wouldn’t do to print,” a witness recalled.
As Plinky evolved, so did the world of sharpshooting. The Toepperweins’ advertisements often extended a special invitation to women, and they came in droves. Syndicated columns touted the healthful nature of outdoor trapshooting and proclaimed that, as Plinky wrote in 1917, “there is absolutely no reason why a woman should not shoot as well as a man.” Some women formed female trapshooting clubs, and tournaments added amateur women’s divisions. Annie Oakley, now in her fifties, joined the upswell by giving shooting clinics for women. When Oakley and Plinky met at one of them, in 1915, the older sharpshooter reportedly told the younger, “You’re the greatest shot I’ve ever seen.”
Crack. On that 1916 winter day in Alabama, Plinky’s blister burned. She was so close. Just a few more targets, and she would beat the 965-pigeon record she’d been chasing for eight years. Crack. Crack. Crack. Plinky’s shoulder ached, her hand was on fire, her ears rang—but before long, a cheer went up. She had done it. Of 1,000 clay targets, she’d hit 975.
A doctor came over and bandaged Plinky’s hand. But her eyes were on the trap machine. No man or woman had ever shot at two thousand traps in a regulation setting. She was already halfway there. Why not keep going?
So Plinky shouldered her Winchester Model 97 again. Six shots in, she ripped off the bandage—it was interfering with her grip. As Plinky worked her way through sets of 100, the blister opened. Blood smeared onto the hot barrel of the gun. She kept shooting. Finally, after a total of five hours and twenty minutes, Plinky had hit 1,952 of 2,000 targets. She did even better in her second 1,000 than her first, shattering 977 clays.
Plinky didn’t know it on that jubilant day, but this big accomplishment would also be one of her last. After America’s entry into World War I, she and Ad took a break from touring to teach shooting to aviation instructors in Austin. (When they did do shows, Ad switched his Indian heads on tin to Uncle Sam heads on wood.) Things went back to normal after the war, and the 1920s roared alongside Ad and Plinky’s guns. But just as the two were getting back into their busy touring-and-competing schedule, Plinky’s career came to a screeching halt.
A “serious illness.” An “operation.” Though neither the newspapers that used those words nor the Toepperweins ever revealed exactly what was wrong, Plinky took several years off in the early 1920s. By the time she was ready to come back, Winchester had gotten used to life without her—it didn’t re-sign her. Heartbroken, the woman who’d built a life and career around sharpshooting was forced to forge a new identity. She threw herself into archery and bowling, becoming good enough at the latter to win tournaments. She instructed silent film stars in shooting when Hollywood productions came to San Antonio. And she got to spend more time with Lawrence, who, despite early prowess as a competitive shooter, became a successful newspaper illustrator and crime reporter.
Through it all, she continued to practice shooting, and she and Ad gave occasional exhibitions together, once performing for President Calvin Coolidge. Still modest, she demurred when a reporter asked about her shooting accolades in 1930. “I’d rather talk about my bowling,” she said. “I got my average up to 172 last year.” She eventually told the journalist why she had accomplished so many sharpshooting feats: “I just wanted to prove to myself,” she said, “that I’m no sissy.”
For many Americans, the 1940 brochure came as a shock. “COMING,” it blared. “The Famous TOPPERWEINS: World’s Greatest Shooting Team.” Above those words was a photo of Ad, his mustache gray but his eyes alert and a gun on his shoulder. And there was 58-year-old Plinky, who’d been retired for close to two decades, sporting a flowered granny dress and a cheerful grin. In 1940, with war on the horizon and gun manufacturers eager to raise their profiles, Winchester had finally rehired her. She toured the country with Ad once again, her performances as sharp as ever.
The Toepperweins met the Second World War much the same way they’d met the first: Ad “drew” Uncle Sam heads, and the duo traveled to Army camps to perform and share shooting tips. Plinky’s hands were steady, but her health wasn’t. In late 1940, Lawrence had died suddenly of complications from alcoholism, and Ad wrote in 1944 that Plinky had “never gotten over the shock.” Less than a year later, at age 62, Plinky died after suffering a heart attack. Ad retired from exhibition shooting, continuing to teach marksmanship until his own death, at 92.
To the end, Plinky kept her promise to remain a lady. In 1939, a visitor to the Toepperweins’ den—“a remarkable, helter-skelter, gun-infested room”—found that this tough old broad who smoked cigarettes and blasted rattlesnakes off the porch had never lost her tender heart. “Plinky is emotional,” he wrote. “Her voice breaks over an unkind word, and just as quickly over a thoughtful gift.” She had struck a balance between traditional masculinity and femininity, refusing to fully embrace either as she carved her own path. Along the way, she’d watched generations of women embrace sharpshooting. “[Ten years ago] I was among the few women who took kindly to firearms and was looked upon as a freak,” she wrote in 1917. “Today . . . at every trapshooting event we find women facing the traps.” (The sport still thrives among women—twenty-year-old Texan Ryann Phillips, ranked first among U.S. female trapshooters, competed in the event at this year’s Paris Olympics.) Plinky and Ad always maintained that anyone with normal eyesight could learn to do what they did. When two women once asked Plinky how she’d gotten so good, she answered in six syllables: “Practice. Practice. Practice.”
In 1941, a year after Lawrence’s death and only four years before Plinky’s own, Winchester made a video of one of the Toepperweins’ exhibitions. In a sunny field in southern Illinois, men in straw hats and ladies with coiffed hair smile and applaud as Ad and Plinky, clad in matching Winchester vests, go through their routine. At one point, as if to reassure her as she gets ready to shoot a target out of his mouth, Ad strolls over and gives Plinky a kiss. At another, Ad sticks five shotgun shells on the tips of his fingers. “Now, honey, be careful,” he says. “There’s lots of finger in those shells.”
Plinky’s first shot misses by a hair. She curses mildly, then aims again. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. The shells, hit on their shiny brass ends, go spinning into oblivion. Ad wiggles his powder-stained fingers, showing the crowd that, after more than thirty years of marriage, all five are still there. Next, he hangs a string of four pieces of chalk from his collar, each one sticking out from his chest like a peg. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack. Ad stands like a cardboard cutout, barely flinching as each piece explodes mere inches from his heart.
The trick complete, Plinky walks over and tries to stick another piece of chalk in Ad’s mouth. He pretends to shrink away. “Don’t be afraid,” Plinky chides. “I won’t miss it.”
And, of course, she doesn’t.
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