Woman on target for shot at senior games

WASILLA — Barbara Shew simply doesn’t understand why more people her age don’t compete in sporting events.

“Life is too short to be boring. Anyone can sit in the house all day and watch TV, use the computer,” she said.

Shew will be competing this summer in the Alaska International Senior Games in Fairbanks from Aug. 9-18. Her event? Shooting, both rifle and pistol, though she prefers rifle.

“I learned to shoot in the Navy and that’s what I shot,” she said.

Right now, she said, she has two goals. First, she wants to try to convince more Valley seniors to compete in the annual games.

“There’s so many people who live here,” she said, referring to her apartment complex and the ones nearby in the campus of Wasilla Area Seniors Inc.

“A lot of them are a lot healthier than I am,” she said.

Besides recruitment, Shew said, she’s working on fundraising. She said she’s taking letters and business cards with her to businesses and doctors’ appointments. It’s been slow-going.

“I’m not a nonprofit so they can’t tax-deduct it,” she said.

As a disabled senior living on Social Security, she can’t afford the trip to the Senior Games on her own. But she’s determined to go, one way or the other.

“I’ll stay in Fairbanks so long as the money holds out,” she said.

Shew said that after the Navy — she was a hospital corpsman during the Vietnam War — she kept up her marksmanship as a state trooper in Maryland just outside of Washington, D.C. In her off hours, she’d sometimes hunt in the area. In three of the four years she hunted, she said, she bagged her yearly allotted deer.

Eventually, she had to retire from the troopers, though.

“I got injured in the line of duty,” she said.

When the heat in Maryland got to be too much, she left to come to Alaska.

“Alaska is, for a disabled senior, a comfortable state compared to many of them,” she said.

She’s able to live a modest life at the senior center, one which she said she enjoys. She said that in her time she’s trained dogs and she sometimes gives safety lectures at the senior center.

She said that seniors can be easy prey for criminals who think they can’t fight back or run away. One piece of advice she gives, Shew said, is that if you live in senior housing or another type of apartment building and keep a gun around for protection, make sure it’s loaded with birdshot if at all possible. That way there’s less risk of missing your attacker and accidentally shooting through a wall and injuring a neighbor.

Shew said she’s looking forward to the games and that she’s kept up her aim through her years in Alaska both shooting squirrels that were very destructive at her Fairview Loop-area home and shooting targets.

“I drive my best friend nuts because he’s a real gun aficionado,” she said. “We’d go plunking and he wanted to go through 100 rounds,” Shew said. But that’s not her style. “Two or three targets, if I could do it well, that’s it for me.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.