Yeah, I really wondered about the whiplash thing!

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One of the coolest fencers I ever met and had the pleasure and privilege of fencing with many times, both in competition and free-play, was Dan Drumheller from Spokane.

His form was excellent (looked like the pictures in the book) and his actions were clean, precise, and well thought out. He was an avid reader of books on fencing, as I was. He had read Nadi's On Fencing, of course, plus others that also went well beyond the basics. He recommended Fencing Tactics by Percy Nobbs to me (long out of print; I lucked out and found a copy at Shorey's, Seattle's—and one of the country's—biggest used bookstores back in the late 40s), which I read with great profit. We had also both read and poured through Schools and Masters of Fence from the Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century by Edgerton Castle, which was lavishly illustrated with plates from many old fencing treatises and manuals. I just checked "bookfinder" for that and found one copy:   over $200.00!).

Dan picked up a few things from books like Castle's. Old moves that were rarely used anymore. For example, he would rarely "stop thrust" (which seems to be the prefered method of meeting an attack these days), but when he did, he would couple it with a body move, such as the inquartata, a sort of "reverse lunge," in which the fencer steps to the right with his left foot, turning his whole body to the right and replacing the parry by displacing his target. In THIS PHOTO, the fencer doing the inquartata is left-handed, so it's a mirror-image of the move Dan did. He also did the passata sotto ("low blow?"), which is similar, but also operates on the idea of not being quite where you're opponent expects you to be whenever you attempt a stop-thrust.

Dan had a half-a-dozen little manouvers like that, including one he called the "Dirty Pierre," which involved parrying an attack while simultaneously standing upright (instead of the usual bent kneed position), stepping forward with his left foot and turning his left side toward his opponent before he had a chance to recover from his lunge. Dan would be practically sitting in his lap if he weren't standing, too close for him to parry a riposte; and with this little pirouhette, Dan's riposte resembled a matador going over the horns with his sword.

But Dan didn't do any of this stuff very often. And you never knew when it was coming. If at all.

But mainly, Dan was just a good, precise, skillful, and intelligent fencer. With him, it was a brain game. He was a lot of fun to fence with, even when he was thoroughly cleaning your clock.

Don Firth