January 23, 1882
New Haven, Connecticut

• 1882 Elizabeth Servaty born in New Haven
• 1902 employee at the Winchester factory in New Haven
•  met Adolph (Ad) Toepperwein
  – Americanized as the “Topperweins”
  – he was  sales rep and exhibition shooter for the Winchester
• 1903 They married
• 1904 son Lawrence  was born
• Ad gave Elizabeth her first shooting lessons and discovered that she was a “natural.”
• After shooting a tin can, which made a “plinking” sound. Elizabeth exclaimed, “I plinked it”
  – first to coin this phrase?
• Ad and Plinky performed for forty years
• first woman in the United States to qualify as a national marksman with the military rifle
•  first woman to break 100 straight targets at trapshooting
  –  she repeated this more than 200 times
  – often with a twelve-gauge Winchester model 97 pump
• held the world endurance trapshooting record of 1,952 of 2,000 targets in five hours and twenty minutes
• 1940 son Lawrence died at the age of thirty-six
• 1943  last tour
• January 27, 1945 “Plinky” Toepperwein died
• 1969 inducted into the Trapshooting Hall of Fame in Vandalia, Ohio

Annie Oakley once said to Plinky, “Mrs. Top . . . you’re the greatest shot I’ve ever seen.”

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fto43