The Riflewoman

On the firing line at Camp Perry, Ohio, the pigtailed blonde in striped shorts wiggled comfortably into prone position on the tarp, and consulted a makeshift wind gauge built of a bent coat hanger, a spent cartridge shell and a bit of nylon hose. Then, tucking the butt of a .22-cal. Winchester Special into her right shoulder, she began perforating the nickel-sized bull's-eye in the target 50 yds. off. With all this to watch, her male competitors in last week's National Smallbore Rifle Championships could scarcely keep their minds on the range. "Not only can Lenore Jensen outshoot me," said one, "but she's got the prettiest legs on the firing line." A pert and dark-eyed senior at Central Michigan University (where she was the 1959 homecoming queen), Lenore Jensen, 20, has been outshooting the competition, male and female, since she entered her first rifle match five years ago. She won the National Women's Smallbore Championship in 1959 and 1960, set three records in a single weekend last month, once collected 3,195 out of a possible 3,200 points in a 320-shot match.

Lenore Jensen grew up surrounded by sureshot kin, practiced marksmanship as a tot. "When Lenore was two," recalls her mother, "she carried a toy rifle around with her. She'd sprawl out on the living room floor, and people would laugh and say, 'Look at that. Perfect prone position.' " Her father, who died when Lenore was eleven, was a topflight competitive marksman; her mother has been firing smallbore rifles for 24 years, last year won the National Women's Any Sight Championship. Stepfather Marvin Driver is a crack pistol shot and longtime director of the National Rifle Association. Lenore's kid sister Candy, 16, is the 1960 U.S. junior champion, was runner-up last year to Lenore for the senior title.

After a slow start at Camp Perry last week. Lenore finally zeroed in on the bull, missed winning her third straight U.S. women's championship by a single point, 4,775 to the 4,776 record of Janet Friddell, who regained the title she lost to Lenore in 1959. But nobody really seemed to mind, least of all Lenore, whose plans for the future include introducing her fiance, Central Michigan's onetime star quarterback Oarie Lemanski, to the special delights of the firing line.

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