Gene Barth told Referee Magazine that when he was a line judge, the auxiliary down box man handed him the pistol toward the end of a quarter. Barth put the gun in his back pocket. When the quarter ended he reached into his back pocket to pull out the gun and the firearm went off. He said the mishap flash burned his posterior.

From the earliest days of American football until as late as 1994, referees on the field used a starter pistol to call the ends of quarters and of games. When the leagues that became the NFL first started in 1920, there was no official standard for calling plays dead, ending quarters, or any other action taken by an officiating crew.

Officials in American and Canadian football formerly used a starting pistol to end each quarter of a game. In the NFL this was first done in 1924, to avoid confusion with the whistles and air horns used for other signals; at the time the stadium clock did not show the official game time, which was kept by the officials on the field.

It seems strange today, but NFL officials used to fire a starter's pistol to end each quarter. It's a mechanic that dated back to the start of pro football up until the NFL discontinued the practice starting in 1994. When the NFL was in its infancy and up through the 1960s, stadium clocks were not…

To solve the problem, football officials out West borrowed a tool from basketball whose timekeepers often used a gong or starter's pistol to signal when the clock ran out. The first reference for the pistol's use in football is from a 1916 game between Occidental and Whittier in California.