But other gangsters noticed. It was with a .38 Super souped up into a machine-pistol (with a Thompson fore grip) that Babyface Nelson used to shoot his way out of the Little Bohemia raid that year, killing one FBI agent. That gun is still on display in the Bureau’s headquarters and it is a slick piece of craftsmanship, no matter how loathsome the purpose to which it was set.

Still, it seems to me it was the .357 Mag. that can truly claim to be the caliber invented to counter the road warriors, with the .38 Super adapted only as a kind of stop-gap measure. A favorite of the FBI agents was the 5-inch-barreled revolver, blued richly with a trigger action that felt like ball-bearings on glass, that rolled out of the Smith plant, a beauty of a gun that put the pill exactly where pointed, with devastating effect. With a 1930s velocity of 1,500 fps and a heavier bullet, it got the job done.

It’s said, too, that the early .38 Supers that emerged from the Colt plant were noted for disappointing accuracy, obviating much of their seeming tactical advantages. The culprit was held to be barrels cut to allow headspacing on the cartridge rim rather than its mouth, which resulted in groups no lawman would trust at any range save the closest. I must say: I did have a 1948 “Super .38” with this engineering “flaw” and it shot well—not great, but well up to my meager abilities. Possibly it wasn’t a minute-of-angle gun, but it was certainly a minute-of-Clyde pistol.

Surpassed by the .357 Mag., then ignored during the war when most civilian gun production halted, the .38 Super nearly died. For a long, long time, only the numbers of guns that Colt had sold in the six years until the coming of the .357 Mag. kept the cartridge in production, but always in small numbers and therefore at higher prices. If the gun had a nesting place, it was in Latin cultures, which is why so many of the guns from the great Ice Age of the Super bear Latin styling flourishes, like chrome finishes, ornate engraving, carved ivory or faux ivory grips. Even today, sites such as Collectors’ Firearms will offer a batch of shiny Colt Supers under names like “El Rey Supremo” or “El Senador.” This is because Mexico commits the most fundamental of gun-restriction follies by banning cartridges in military denominations, like 9 mm Luger, .45 ACP and 5.56x45 mm NATO. (A look at today’s Mexican crime situation almost certainly requires the question: So, how’d that work out for you?)

As a non-military cartridge, the .38 Super became the go-to round for police agencies in Latin countries and, of course, spread rapidly to non-police agencies, i.e., criminals. And for many years, the best .38 Super was loaded by Aguila, the Mexican ammunition maker.

That changed with the coming of IPSC, and it explains why my first .38 Super was a 9 mm Luger Springfield converted to a race gun by a talented gunsmith (now moved on to other endeavors, sadly) named Steve Woods. It was a honey: Woods gave it a crisp trigger, put sunken Bo-Mars atop the slide, sculpted the grip for my not-exactly-gigantic hands, and engineered a brilliantly efficient compensator. When I shot it full out, it sounded like a Sten gun, and everybody else stopped shooting and came to see what I was up to. (I’m not saying I hit much with it, and it was really like putting a Porsche in the hands of a go-karter.)

The reason the .38 Super was such a hit with the folks who ran guns for sport was that in reloads its velocity and weight algebra could be brought up to the threshold of the magic “major” classification that Jeff Cooper built into the sport’s rules to fence out the puny 9 mms, which he felt offered a technical match advantage but not enough fighting seriousness. The Super, by his completely arbitrary mathematical formula, got just over the limit; it was also so highly pressurized that it worked well with the compensators in vogue then, and continued to produce low-end recoil, faster recovery times, and a slight capacity advantage, comically useless to me but of great import to competitors who were but hundredths of seconds apart.

Alas, like so many others—and like the 1948 Super—the Woods gun got away from me and I’m still wondering why. I think I spent the money on beer and fudge. Sic transit gloria mundi. Anyhow, I never gave up my love for the caliber and of late have acquired two examples of it: An S&W Doug Koenig special, a very fine gun; and a Kimber Super Match II, another superb gun—I had to guide through Maryland’s twisted arroyo of gun laws, as they originally ruled it inadmissible. Why? Don’t get me started.

Which leads me to what the gun represents today and for whom it’s good. There is one person in the world for whom it’s a best choice: me. That is because I love the M1911 platform for its reliability and its heritage. It’s like shaking hands with John Moses Browning, with Sam Colt looking on fondly. There’s something so classical in it and so full of history—from Vietnam to Korea to Ranger Hamer to FBI agent Charles Winstead (who used it to terminate John Dillinger as he drew a .380 ACP) to Argonne Woods to Pancho Villa and of course to my old and beloved friends Pike and Dutch—that it seems almost a charged relic, like a great samurai sword; you can hear far-off trumpets, the slap of the leather as it rocked on young Audie Murphy’s belt across Europe, the staccato of alley gunfights, the three shots Winstead fired on July 23, 1934—each time you pick one up.

So I’ll always have a big boomer or 17 lying around, but still I have thin hands, smallish too, and lack those Popeye-forearms that all the truly great gunboys boast. So for my meatless paws, recoil is amplified; that’s why I won’t own or shoot a .40 S&W and launch .38 Spls. in all my .357 Mags. But the .38 Super is perfect for me; it’s classic, it’s accurate (the Koenig Smith even makes me look good!), it’s beautiful, and with Cor-Bon +Ps producing a muzzle energy of 516 ft.-lbs. it’s far more than adequate for any self-defense load.

It has disadvantages, of course. One is the relative rarity of ammunition; the second, a function of the first, is the relative cost of the ammunition. I buy in bulk and even the Grand Duchy of Maryland lets UPS ship it to me at considerable savings over per-box purchases at the few gun stores in my benighted area that stock it. Another disadvantage is a function of the first and second; there being few loads, what do you do if your gun shoots none of them well? Hmmm: One answer would be to reload. Another answer is probably not for all but it always works for me: Use it as an excuse to buy another gun.

Understand and love it for what it is: a cult cartridge with a whiff of romantic history to it, as launched from the most American of platforms. It has a place on the shelf of the safe that began as a place on the shelf of the memory and the imagination. As Pike said to Dutch, “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”