This is an I-Heart podcast.

And we continue here on our American stories.

Ruger is the biggest gun manufacturer in the country, and it's not by accident. In the

words of William Ruger, each firearm is built, quote, to a standard so I would want one even if it was

made by our competitors. You to tell this American story is Logan Meddish. Logan is a firearms historian

and museum professional who runs high-caliber history LLC.

Here's Logan.

The timing really couldn't have been better for William Ruger when he and Alexander

Stern became business partners in January of 1949. Riggard had been making hand tools for the

previous few years, but unfortunately business was not going well for him. He found himself

$40,000 in debt, and he was pretty much ready to close up shop when he showed Sturm a prototype of something

that he was working on, which harkened back to his earlier days with military arms development.

So Sturm liked what he saw and agreed to bankroll the project with $50,000 in seed money.

And just like that, those two men began laying the foundation

for what would become one of the largest firearm companies

in the United States.

But in order to get there, you have to realize where they came from.

So let's start with William Ruger.

His dad was a lawyer, and his mother was from a family that owned a successful chain of department

stores.

As an interesting aside, his great-grandfather was actually a drummer boy at the Battle of Waterloo

in 1815.

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