Billy Perdue, Mobile’s Shotgun Legend, Hit 999 of 1,000 and Won a European Crown in Madrid

MOBILE, Ala. — Plenty of hunters around Mobile have been called good shots. Very few could claim what Billy Perdue could: near-perfect scores in skeet and trap, a European live pigeon championship won in Madrid and a place as the only shooter ever enshrined in the Mobile Sports Hall of Fame. Nearly three decades after his death, the friends who hunted beside him still speak of his marksmanship with something close to awe.

William C. “Billy” Perdue died in 1997. For roughly 60 years before that, he astonished those who watched him shoot, whether in the dove fields of west Mobile County or before crowds of European dignitaries at the great gun clubs of Spain.

“To say he was a good shot is an extreme understatement,” said retired federal judge Randy Butler, who as a teenager in the mid-1950s joined Perdue on many hunting and freshwater fishing trips. “He was something to see.”

Billy Perdue’s record in skeet and trap

Perdue made the All-American skeet team four times in the 1940s. During World War II, he served — fittingly — as a gunnery officer in the U.S. Navy.

After the war, he took up trap shooting, generally considered the harder of the two clay target disciplines. In skeet, targets cross in front of the shooter on a steady, predictable path from either side. In trap, the clays fly away from the shooter at angles that are much harder to anticipate.

The difference did not seem to slow him down. In 1948, Perdue broke 999 of 1,000 skeet targets. The next year, he posted the same 999-of-1,000 mark in trap.

According to a 1979 magazine profile, he broke 99 of 100 clay targets in his very first competition, at the Atlanta Gun Club, and later shot a perfect 200 of 200 to win the North American Clay Target Championship. He also won championships in Dallas and Kansas City.

Live pigeon shooting and the European title

Perdue soon became a top contender in live pigeon shooting, a sport with roots in Europe in the late 1700s that took hold in America in the early 1900s. He is credited with downing 25 birds in a row on 134 separate occasions and once ran 127 straight at a match in Pennsylvania.

In 1952, he took his talents overseas and won the coveted European Championship in Madrid, dropping 20 of 20 birds and then 10 more in a row in a shoot-off.

That victory launched years of competing abroad each spring and summer, combined with long, comfortable trips through Spain, Italy, France, Belgium, Portugal and Morocco, as well as Cuba and Mexico. Friends say Perdue always seemed to have a comfortable measure of wealth, and his prize money helped pay for the elevated but unpretentious life he enjoyed.

Guy Avedisian, a competitive shooter based in central Florida who wrote the 1979 feature on Perdue, described the world he moved in.

“In Europe back then, it was incredibly popular, and it was an elegant affair,” Avedisian said. “There were betting pavilions associated with the shooting and the restaurants that were attached to the gun clubs had white-linen tablecloths. To this day, there are some great clubs in Spain.”

Competitors often performed before audiences that could include royalty and other dignitaries.

‘That’s what I live for’

At home, Perdue was known as an outdoorsman whose enthusiasm may have been unmatched. Steve McCoy, a friend who owned and ran McCoy Outdoors Co. for 25 years beginning in 1975, remembers a man who made fun his life’s work.

“Everybody aspired to have as much fun as he did,” McCoy said. “The story goes that he only worked a day in his life, that he was told he would have to wear a necktie, and he said, ‘No thanks’ after the first day, and that was the end of it.”

Years later, McCoy said, Perdue’s wife asked him whether he really had to do something fun every day.

“He said, ‘Of course. That’s what I live for.’ And he did,” McCoy said. “The only thing that would stop him was maybe the weather.”

When bird seasons were closed, Perdue played golf and fished. Butler remembers riding with him in a small wooden boat after bass on creeks in northern Mobile County and on Bayou Heron, just across the Mississippi line.

Dove fields west of Hillcrest

Much of their time together, though, was spent duck hunting on the muddy flats of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta or shooting doves in what was then mostly farmland on the western edge of Mobile.

“Back then, dove fields were everywhere west of Hillcrest, probably, and out towards the airport, whether you went down towards Grand Bay or whether you went up towards Citronelle,” Butler said. “There was lots of farming, lots of agriculture and no subdivisions, no schools or shopping malls. There were cornfields everywhere, so there were lots of doves in West Mobile County and right across the Escatawpa River in Mississippi.”

Butler does not recall crossing the bay with Perdue, but he knows Baldwin County’s broad farmland was another regular destination.

The two would throw together hunting blinds from whatever was at hand — corn stalks, brush, pieces of shrubs. Butler believes Perdue’s choice of where to set up was nearly as important as his aim.

“He knew how to size up a field and where to position himself,” Butler said. “A lot of people hunt from the fence rows, but one of the things I learned from Billy is that when you’re in the middle of the field you’ve got a 360-degree radius to shoot a bird.”

Because good hunting was a short drive away, businessmen friends sometimes slipped out of the office to join him for an afternoon.

“I couldn’t go very often because I was running my business, but he’d want to go every day and was always looking for somebody to go with him,” McCoy said. “He didn’t enjoy the big, organized dove shoots as much as just him and a buddy going. That was his idea of an afternoon of sport.”

Bending barrels for a better shot

McCoy also maintained and modified Perdue’s guns. Perdue began his competitive career with Winchester shotguns, moved to English-made Purdey guns for several years and later favored a 12-gauge side-by-side built in Italy by the prestigious gunmaker Fabbri. The Fabbri was a gift, McCoy said, though the maker surely understood the promotional value of having it in Perdue’s hands. It was far plainer than many of the firm’s showpiece guns.

“Billy liked the function of the gun, not the beauty of the gun,” McCoy said.

Perdue never stopped tinkering. At times that meant physically bending a barrel upward so the gun would shoot higher, closer to the way he naturally saw his targets.

“Most people wouldn’t dream of doing that, but Billy was always tinkering with his guns and trying to improve his shooting even though he was one of the best shots in the world,” McCoy said. “You’ve got to bend them a little bit, try and see where the point of impact is, and then you bend it some more. And then when he got ready to sell one, he’d bend it back straight.”

Carolina Hall and a low-key life

Perdue was also a voracious reader, a gifted storyteller and a lover of wine. Friends say success in real estate helped make his charmed life possible. His family lived for many years in the antebellum home on South McGregor Avenue known as Carolina Hall, sometimes called Yester House, and he sold a large tract of land that became the Yester Oaks neighborhood.

For all of that, he kept a modest profile. Butler recalls Perdue driving a Volkswagen bus on their hunting and fishing trips. McCoy remembers a later vehicle that was just as humble.

“He had an old Chevy van for his hunting car, and he enjoyed wine that was reasonably priced but of excellent quality,” McCoy said. “He didn’t live extravagantly, and he didn’t draw attention to himself.”

Hall of Fame honors

Recognition found him anyway. The National Skeet Shooting Association inducted Perdue into its Hall of Fame in 1975. In 1992, he was welcomed into the Mobile Sports Hall of Fame, which had inducted its first class in 1987 to honor athletes and sports figures with ties to the Mobile area.

For that occasion, the late Danny Dumont, Perdue’s longtime friend and hunting partner, wrote a detailed profile that included a striking assessment: “If the shooting sports he engaged in were televised events like baseball or football, he would be a national icon along the lines of Bear Bryant or Arnold Palmer.”

McCoy attended the induction ceremony at the Riverview Plaza Hotel in downtown Mobile and remembers a room full of notable names, including baseball’s Hank Aaron. Aaron’s brother, Tommie Aaron, a Mobile native who also played in the major leagues, was inducted in the same class.

“I think Billy was quite proud of that, being a member of the Hall of Fame,” McCoy said. “It was an honor for him.”

Still one of a kind

Perdue was the first Mobile Sports Hall of Fame inductee whose sport was shooting. Thirty-four years later, he remains the only one among the hall’s 154 members honored for that skill.

That seems fitting to the people who knew him best.

“He was one of a kind, no doubt about it,” McCoy said.

The description applied well beyond the shooting range — to the traveler, the storyteller, the tinkerer and the man who, by his own account, simply set out to enjoy every day.