My father-in-law built a one car plus garage out back of his new house the old fashioned way. He bought rough cut oak lumber from a local saw mill and used tin from a torn down building for the roof. It had two small windows on each side, one large window in the back and a couple of barn style doors in the front to get the vehicle in/out. There was a rear door you could walk in/out of that was covered with the same used roofing tin as the roof.
He had a big oak work bench in the back by the big window. The window lifted up from the bottom and had props on both sides so you could open it and it would stay up and keep the rain/snow off the barrel of your rifle when you were loading/shooting new loads for deer hunting/plinking (deer hunting rounds were used for plinking, too)
I had my car in the garage one night changing spark plugs, rotor button, distributory cap, etc. and my father-in-law had come out to see what I was doing. It was a weekend, so he'd been drinking that scotch he liked.
I had the hood up and was checking the timing (sometimes, if the distributor hold down wasn't really good and tight, and I was winding it up pretty good - just a now and then thing for 20 year old, you know). He reached down, pulled the wire off the #1 plug, stuck his trigger finger up in the boot and moved his thumb close to the spark plug. As he watched that blue fire jump from his thumb to the plug he looked up and said, "Got a good coil/sparkplug wire on this one, see how bright/blue the arc is?' I was pretty surprised. Those GM HEI coils put out over 30,000 volts. He plugged the #1 wire back on and pulled the #2 off and did the same, while telling me to take a closer look. I got too close. That 30,000 plus volts hit me in the shoulder and felt like somebody had smacked me with a flat board. I jumped back and he just laughed at me and checked the last two.
Meanwhile, I saw a field mouse running across one of the rafters/ceiling joists into the shadows on the other side of the garage. I mentioned to him that he had a mouse in his garage. He told me there weren't any mice in "his" garage. A few minutes later, I saw it again and pointed it out to him.
He got to mumbling under his breath and headed out of the garage. He was back in a few minutes with his old Colt Frontier Scout revolver. We stood there talking and the mouse ran across the floor and started up the wall on one of the exposed studs. My father-in-law popped that old revolver up, squeezed off a shot from the hip and the little mouse fell to the floor and kicked a couple times (didn't even bleed much. My father-in-law said, " Ain't no mouse in here now." I said, "Yeah, but you just shot a hole in the wall of your new garage." His reply, "Yeah, but it's a little hole."
You may ask about shooting from the hip. That was his way. My mother-in-law used to have a bag of quarters and nickels she had tossed into the air for him to draw that Colt and shoot them. Some where hit towards the edge and just bent, some had holes in them. He told me one time that he would buy a brick of .22 ammo every Friday evening on the way to work and he'd shoot that brick up by Sunday afternoon.
He never had a full sized Colt but he loaded and carried that Frontier Scout the same as you would a Colt SAA. That equals out to 100 cylinders of practice every weekend. Oh, my father-in-law ate, wrote and shot his rifles and shotguns left handed. He shot his handguns right handed. I asked why. The response was, "When I was growing up there wasn't no such thing as a left handed holster, so I had to buy a right handed holster and learn to shoot a handgun right handed."
Another one of those long ago tales about folks that lived different than we do now and have passed on.
