Hornady

Joyce Hornady's bankers thought the idea was far-fetched, to say the least. Bullets? Making bullets for reloaders? What kind of business was that? A person could go broke in a hurry. The Hornady Sporting Goods Company was a business they could understand; bicycles, tennis rackets, team uniforms, basketballs, baseball bats and gloves. Now, that was a business. But bullets … no, there was no future there. And so it was that J.W. Hornady learned the entrepreneur's first lesson: "A banker is someone who'll lend you an umbrella only when the sun is shining."

In 1949, with World War II over, with the economy returning to peacetime status, with shortages beginning to recede, with Americans anxious to get on with normal lives, Joyce Hornady started a new business. The nation was optimistic. Hornady was especially optimistic. He knew, he absolutely knew, there were thousands of shooters who wanted what he'd wanted: accurate, deadly, dependable bullets they could afford to reload. "Accurate, deadly, dependable" described his products so well that it became the new company’s first advertising slogan.