Sunday, November 25, 2012 9:05 am

By Ted Escobar, The Royal Register editor, Grant County, Washington

MATTAWA - People refer to Elmer Johnston as a gunsmith, but it would be more appropriate to call him a gun enthusiast.

Johnston makes guns all right, simply because he can. He doesn't sell them, because he can't. He just stores them, to the point that he has as many as 300 of all types.

Johnston, 75, has also made replicas of cannons from the Civil War and the old West. He has a library of more than 100 volumes, all about guns. He's a historian who's made presentations at schools.

Johnston's abilities with guns was discovered when he was five, living in Kansas. After a neighbor's house burned, the neighbor gave him a destroyed .22-caliber rifle, probably thinking nothing more would come of it.

The great depression was just ending, and people depended a lot on hunting for survival. The family ate lots of rabbits and squirrels, and Johnston was determined to do his share.

"I made the stock from the wood you burn in the stove," Johnston said. "I straightened out the barrel and used a door spring to make the firing mechanism work. It kept us fed."

Seeking a life of any type, Johnston's family moved to the promised land of Monitor, Washington in 1946. They heard they'd be paid "folding money" to pick apples off a tree and put them in a box.

"We ate bread and baloney. Life was good," Johnston said. "It was the first time I saw corn flakes."

Johnston was a 17-year-old Washingtonian when he enlisted in the Army in 1955. His parents signed for him on the condition he would learn small arms repair.

Things didn't work out that way, at first. The Army wanted him to defuse bombs. His father straightened things out, and he was sent to the small arms repair school in Aberdeen, Maryland.

Eventually Johnston ended up in Germany, where his shooting abilities got the attention of the regimental commander, a skeet shooting enthusiast. He led a "sweet" life after that as the commander's partner in competition nearly every Saturday.

"I got to see a lot of Germany," he said.

Johnston came back from the Army to work agriculture. Making guns would be secondary. He ended up in Mattawa when he decided to offer his welding skills as a business.

"That lasted until the first load of plastic (pipe) showed up," he said.

Johnston kept tinkering with guns, started making them from scratch in the shop he'd built for his welding business. He didn't have much equipment at first.

The initial project was made with a reversible drill, a vice, a hacksaw and a file. Today his shop has about every piece imaginable.

Perhaps the place Johnston first heard himself referred to as a gunsmith was at a muzzle loader rendezvous in the Montana Rockies in the 1980s. A fellow participant had a broken stock. Johnston made one from a block of wood from a Mulberry tree, and word spread there was a gunsmith in camp.

"I worked for 10 days," he said.

Johnston is still making guns. Despite the fact there is little storage room left, he will continue.

"You can't quit," he said. "My dad retired and died 13 months later."