His .45 caliber automatic pistol, based on the same design as the Model 51, was accepted by the Navy Board for production, but the First World War intervened and Remington tooled to produce the M1911 instead.
[citation needed] During the early days of America's involvement in World War II, Pedersen formed a company with the Irwin family, who owned successful furniture manufacturing concerns in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Primarily through Pedersen's contacts in the Ordnance Department, the Irwin-Pedersen Arms Company received a contract to manufacture over 100,000 M1 Carbines to be produced at the rate of 1,000 per day after the Grand Rapids factory was tooled up and in full production.
[2] Unfortunately, due to faulty management and a host of other difficulties, the company failed to achieve mass production and produced slightly over 3,500 M1 Carbines.
[2] Pedersen's sporting designs for Remington are highly regarded today and prized by shooters and collectors alike.
[4][5] General George S. Patton owned a Remington Model 51 and was thought to favor the weapon and is seen in many photos of the era wearing it as his personal sidearm.
During World War II, John Pedersen's attempts through the Irwin-Pedersen Arms Company to mass-produce M1 Carbines for the U.S. military failed.
One day he went "down the line" to deliver a payroll to a railroad crew, and was never heard from again, leaving his now-semi-orphaned daughter to make her way home.
She became a violinist protégé of Sir Thomas Lipton, who helped her attend nursing school and becoming an RN at Victoria Hospital, London.
According to family legend, Reata was a nurse during World War I, working in a field hospital inside a bombed-out church in Belgium when a German shell hit.
Morgan, who did 100 oil paintings for the Red Cross of her as a nurse, at night in a field hospital, using a small flashlight to read a patient's thermometer.
In the early 1920s, when Eric was about 4 and Kristi-Ray was about 3, they moved to England for several years, while John Douglas did some work for the Vickers company.
At the start of the Korean War, his son Eric Pedersen joined the United States Marine Corps and served as a lieutenant in combat in Korea.
[6] Reckless became the first horse to participate in a Marine amphibious landing, was promoted through the ranks from private to corporal to sergeant, and at the war's end was shipped to Camp Pendleton, California, where she lived out her retirement as a beloved mascot.