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The 1973 Miramonte High School yearbook lists a Rifle Club, supervised by Haldor Berg. The 1974 MHS yearbook chronicles the club’s expansion to include archery; it listed a Mr. Muller as advisor. The yearbook says the club took field trips to Chabot Rifle Range and to an indoor archery range in San Pablo. Neither club name was mentioned in the 1972 or 1975 yearbooks.
Harold Hallikainen grew up in Orinda but never shot a gun. “My brother Dave did, though. I think his hearing was damaged by it,” he said.
Dave Hallikainen hiked and rode motorcycles along the hills around Orinda where he came across cans used for target practice. He said “the only shooting I did was behind a friend's house on [Orinda’s] Van Tassel Lane. They had a rodent problem. After school we would take turns shooting them with a .22 rifle. No one gave us a hard time about it and to the best of my knowledge none of us turned into mass-murderers.”
He also remembers Orinda Hardware sold guns. “Looking at them was the fun part of going there,” he said. The guns were BB or pellet guns, a store employee recently clarified. The employee, who declined to be named, said the store sells one model with the relatively slow muzzle velocity of 350 feet per second.
“We only sell to those over 18,” he emphasized, and each time they make a sale “the parents get a good talking to” about safety.
Hallikainen remembers firearms being present in several of his friends’ homes, but said “we never touched them. Kids just knew not to handle guns unless you were given the okay by an adult.” One 1960s exception to that unwritten code happened, he said, when high school students driving around town shot out residential windows. Not surprisingly, alcohol was involved.
“They hit a house down the street from us and a girl's finger was injured from a bullet fragment,” Hallikainen said. “Everyone was shocked.”
Erik Olafsson, who was raised in Orinda and now lives in Canyon, said his brother owned a pellet gun when they were young, but added, “I was never interested in it, and have never owned a gun and never will.”
He would be happy to have European style gun laws in the U.S. “My parents are Icelandic, and guns are banned there,” Olafsson said.
“There's not usually a lot of gunfire around Canyon,” noted resident Jonathan Goodwin, who said he didn’t play with firearms as a child. “This area is so reverberant that people would likely complain about it.”
Reach the reporter at:
Lamorinda Weekly, Moraga CA