Urban Cowboys : Six-Shooters Blaze as Make-Believe Gunslingers Reenact Wild West Legends

“Aw, shoot,” aerospace engineer Don Ormand said to himself the day he finally decided he’d spent one week too many sitting in a windowless aircraft company office punching a computer keyboard.

So Ormand went out and bought himself a six-shooter and became a cowboy.

That explains how the Kansas City radar systems expert found himself spitting lead and breathing black-powder smoke as he hunted cardboard buffalo Thursday in a dusty field 50 miles southeast of Los Angeles.

Ormand, 55, is among 400 target shooters gathered for a four-day championship that aims to honor the memory of those who helped tame the West a century ago.

The unusual competition also aims to liven up modern-day lifestyles that have become entirely too tame since then.

The make-believe gunslingers dress up like their favorite cowboy legends, picking Stetsons, jeans and boots like those worn by Jesse James or “Wild Bill” Hickock.

After arming themselves with ancient single-shot revolvers and lever-action shotguns, they act out shoot-’em-up scenarios that they acknowledge are wilder than any the Wild West normally served up.

“The old West was really a pretty crappy place,” said Harper Creigh, a 59-year-old Santa Ana architectural model-maker who assumes the persona of legendary Judge Roy Bean when he dresses up. Creigh is a founder of the 9-year-old Single Action Shooting Society, which is sponsoring the competition.

“This is the Old West of our minds. We’re people who grew up loving Western movies--Roy Rogers, Gene Autry and Hopalong Cassidy were our baby-sitters. This is a fantasy: If Roy and Gene didn’t do it on the screen, we don’t do it either,” Creigh said.

Some of the timed target events are straight out of Saturday matinees. Shooters are required to do things like sit at a saloon table twirling a tin cup before firing a double-barreled shotgun under the table at one target and before emptying a derringer and a pistol at two others.

“This is a hell of a lot of fun!” exclaimed computer programmer Dale Constantine, 51, of Glendale, as he portrayed a gambler playing cards and spitting a gum ball wad into a spittoon.

Such events have caused the 7,000-member shooting group to double in size during each of the past three years, according to society leader Ken Amorosano, a Hollywood public relations company owner. The shooting--coupled with events such as stunt shows, a cowboy poetry competition and roping exhibitions--is expected to draw as many as 15,000 onlookers to the Prado Dam Recreation Area by Sunday, Amorosano said. Adult admission is $9.

Ormand, meantime, said being a pretend gunslinger has given him a new bead on living.

“Before, life just wasn’t exciting,” he said.