Soon after, my sister Linda and her family Pete, Nicole and Meghann came to visit. We took them to Margaret River and down to Albany and Luke seemed to always cry. So we made up and filmed a TV commercial about a product that will protect your ears. Although we were living in a upper-class suburb, a couple of months after we bought our house, we were robbed and they slashed at all of our suitcases and took my precious Hasselblad camera but we were insured. Mimi’ s sister was able to purchase a new one for me from Hong Kong and this time I had a better lens that was more aligned to the types of photos I routinely took.
One night we had a power outage and were unable to heat up Luke’ s formula. We had made friends with our neighbors, Pam and Rod. Rod was a mechanical engineer and had the problem solved within minutes. He went out to his well equipped tool shed / garage and used his oxyacetylene torch to gently heat up the formula to solve the problem. We still talk about that once in awhile to-date as we have maintained our friendship over the many years.
During my first couple of years in Perth, I joined the West Australian Clay Target Association. The State Government had just invested a few million dollars and created a world class facility much larger and more sophisticated than my old club in New York at Thunder Mountain. Ammo back then was reasonably inexpensive so shooting 4 rounds of skeet at 25 shots a round was affordable and more importantly- fun. I became quite good at ordinary skeet and I advanced to olympic style skeet called ISSF Skeet, which has a much higher degree of difficulty. For example, rather than have the gun stock at your shoulder and aimed at the known direction of the clay pigeon, the gun stock, when shooting ISSF style, has to be at your hip. It cannot be moved to your shoulder until the pigeon is released and there is a variable delay when you yell pull and the pigeon is released that is between 0-3 seconds. Also, the pigeons fly faster and they are thicker than regular pigeons so they are harder to break.
Clockwise: Mimi, Barry, Nicole, Luke and Meghann in Perth Zoo
Pam and Rod Mathers
One year I won the club champion in ISSF Skeet which was difficult to do. I then had to represent our club in a State wide competition. The drive to this skeet range took me 2.5 hours one way early in the morning to get there in time for the competition. Unfortunately, my nerves got the best of me and I didn’ t win. But if I did, I would have represented Western Australia for a National match and the winner of that would represent Australia in the Olympics. I know there were quite a few very significant‘ ifs’, but I was on my way, nonetheless.
BARRY STEVEN EPSTEIN- PhotoAutobiography DRAFT 67 of 156