Daily Blog - Billy Gene Dickerson, Elite Marksman - 05 October 2026

Above: Billy Gene Dickerson, 1927 to 2014.

TIMDT’s dad retired from the Air Force as a member of the USAF rifle team, and he won about every award that wasn’t nailed down. A Sergeant York type. He grew up barefoot in the back woods of Arkansas and learned to shoot Kentucky windage — hold off into the breeze and trust the eye. Later he picked up the science too: Coriolis effect, load, velocity and all the rest of it. In his competition days, Bill regularly "hit five with a V" at 1000 yards.

TIMDT has a picture of Bill receiving an award from Prince Philip after a shooting competition in the UK. Bill, who passed on circa 2010, bequeathed TIMDT with a box full of his shooting medals.

Bill lied about his age to get into the Navy in 1942. He was fifteen. He served on a minesweeper at Linguayan Gulf and spent his whole career in uniform, jumping from the Navy to the Army and finally to the Air Force. He retired around 1969 as an E-9, Chief Master Sergeant.

Bill was squat at five foot seven and endearingly crusty, with a thatch of short grey hair (when I knew him) and a smile that seemed bolted on. He was one of those streetwise enlisted types who had forgotten more practical knowledge than most of the educated, green officers he answered to would ever learn.

In retirement, around 1972, he was caretaker of a Connecticut farm near Litchfield, owned by a high-powered New York lawyer.

Once, while we were on that farm during a visit, he said, “Steve, let’s go shoot some squirrels." Bill and I walked open fields bordered by woods. Bill would stop and say, “Hey, Steve… see that squirrel in the tree over there?” I couldn’t see a thing. With his Stevens 22 rifle, he’d fire a from fifty yards, and a squirrel would drop out of the leaves.

We quit after he’d bagged four squirrels. “Why are you taking them back to the house?” I asked. “We’re gonna cook ’em and eat ’em. There is no justification for killing an animal unless you consume it,” he said. So, we did. He skinned and cleaned them and baked them in the oven. We had squirrel for dinner. Tastes like chicken.