Boots to Fill
Written by Clay Corn
We all have heroes. Or we all should. Even Matthew McConaughey has heroes beyond the ten-year-older dude staring back at him in the mirror. Somebody, when he was younger, inspired him to get up in the morning and get really good at what he does.
Who’s yours? If you don’t have one, find one and study them.
Mine have always worn boots.
I don’t mean my heroes have always been cowboys, but the singers of those words could certainly count themselves among mine, and I’ll spin a yarn in a later post about one of them that I’ll tell to my grandkids if I’ve done a good enough job of giving them a reason to listen.
In my closet are four pairs of cowboy boots. Two of them fit just right. They belong to me. One is a pair of bull hide Ariat work boots that I’ve had for so many years that it’s time to get the heel replaced, though they’ve never seen anything close to the work they were intended to do. The other is a brand-spanking new pair of black crocodile Luccheses that look right smart with a tuxedo.
The others belonged to my two biggest heroes. I’ll start with the pair that is too small:
Wendol Christian was an expert horseman but he wasn’t a cowboy, though he’d probably have called himself one. He was a cattleman. He employed cowboys from time to time. Mostly, he was a farmer. I called him Gramps.
He was my mother’s father and he taught me much about being a man when I was a kid riding with him in the John Deere combine while Dad drove along side us in the white Case tractor pulling the grain cart as we augured over the corn or wheat from our holding bin. It was fascinating work to a 7 year old.
Gramps wore a tall mesh trucker cap representing Shirley Anderson Pittman, Inc. (a local grain elevator outfit), a thin Panhandle Slim pearlsnap tucked in Wranglers that hung on his frame in such a way that he had to frequently hitch them up with the inside of his forearms. On his feet were these reddish/brown round-toed boots that I’m looking at as I write this. They appear to be calfskin and I can’t find a brand, but there’s still a little dirt from a distant Texas panhandle cornfield stuck between the outsole and the instep and scuff marks around the counter to indicate the occasional use of spurs.
They’re maybe a size 9 or 9 ½. Gramps wasn’t a large man, but he was a towering figure in my life and still is. He was the patriarch of what would become a large and close-knit family. He and Louise Donaldson, Granny, married at 18 and had four daughters, 11 grandchildren and an abundance of great grandchildren who all loved them dearly.
Much like The Texas Boot Company in Bastrop, Joe’s Boot Shop is a thriving independent western-wear retailer and general store in Clovis, New Mexico, but in 1978 it was stacks of boxes in Joe Rhodes’ garage outside Muleshoe, Texas. I couldn’t have been much older than 3 but I can remember Gramps carrying me through the back door and into the little shop Joe had set up. I remember Joe picking at me as any proper west Texan purveyor of manly footwear is want to do with his youngest clientele, but mostly I remember clopping out that back door as the proud and exuberant owner of a two-sizes-too-big pair of cowboy boots, but maybe not as proud as the man who purchased them. I wish I could find them now.
Next to the brown boots is a pair of grey full quill ostrich Tony Lamas, broken down from almost 40 years of wear. They’re too big for me, at least in width. These aren’t work boots; these are the boots Dad wore every Sunday out to the tiny church in Oklahoma Lane where, when it was once a school, Wendol met Louise decades prior.
The yellow brick school closed sometime in the 40’s and became the Oklahoma Lane Methodist Church. The gymnasium of this little school was repurposed as the sanctuary where nearly every son and daughter of the sparse local population got hitched, my Mom and Dad among them. It is also where, on two separate occasions, wearing these very boots, my father and his brethren-in-law bore the pall of both of my mother’s parents.
The 1988 Farwell Chamber of Commerce Man of the Year, Ed Corn, was and is the best dad a kid could’ve been lucky enough to have. He came from very humble beginnings, stories I’ll tell in the coming months will fill in the gaps, but though he never became rich he showed me and my siblings what it means to be a father, what it means to get up every day and work your ass off to provide for your family, and he continues every day, as he has for the last forty seven years, to show us what it means to truly, truly love someone.
Farwell is a tiny wide spot in the road on the Texas-New Mexico state line, but everyone who was once a child in that little map-dot from 1980-2000 knows Ed Corn because no matter how much work there was to be done on the farm he always found time for his kids and their friends and their endeavors. Big Ed restored the old school bus and hand-built the supply trailer that Boy Scout Troop 223 took on expeditions into the mountains of New Mexico. Big Ed, in our 16-passenger Dodge van, wagged countless kids around to basketball tournaments, on ski trips, to cheerleading competitions, piano recitals, on waterpark excursions and anything else his brood’s collective heart desired. Big Ed wasn’t just a father to us, his children; he was a father to every kid of Farwell, Texas. Dad eventually retired from farming and began teaching school, gilding, sometimes more successfully than others, the troubled youth of Clovis, New Mexico.
I asked Dad where he got these boots and he said, “You know, Joe Rhodes used to sell boots out of his garage until he opened his first store…”
“Yeah, Dad. I remember.”
And so today, March 31, 2015, marks a momentous day in my history and that of my son, Grayson. Today we met Marc Conselman, Grayson’s “Joe Rhodes”, at the Texas Boot Company in Bastrop. Walking through the front door of this grand establishment is a little different than walking through the back door of Joe’s little red brick house, but the experience will, I hope, be forever etched into Grayson’s young mind. Marc met us at the door with a friendly smile and sturdy handshake. After the cute young ladies from the exceedingly gregarious staff finished fawning over Grayson, Marc extended his hand to him, “Let’s go find you some boots!”
We paused in the men’s boots section for a moment while Marc pointed out a few new additions to the inventory since the last time I was in. Looking for box-toed giraffe? The Texas Boot Company can now supply you with just such commodity. Sea bass? Why, Marc’s wearing them now… Shark? Kangaroo? They’re all here, but that’s not why we are.
We headed on back to the kids’ section. Grayson’s growing fast so I wasn’t interested in anything too extravagant, but I spotted them almost immediately. I let Marc show us a few he was proud of and offered for Grayson to try on before I reached for the pair I wanted to see Grayson in. They were the tiny version of my own Ariats. “Look, buddy! Just like Daddy!”
Marc put them on Grayson while I held him in my lap. A little too big but not so that they wouldn’t stay on. Lots of room to grow. Grayson stood up and wobbled with these new contraptions on his feet.
“You like ‘em?” I ask
“Yeah.” He shakes his head…
Marc stood up and walked a few feet away. I tell Grayson to walk over to Mr. Marc, which he happily but carefully does with a stride akin to an adult wearing ski boots. Clop clop clop.
Marc coaxed Grayson to run on his return trip to me. It worked. Within seconds he found his stride and had this whole boot-wearing thing down.
“We’ll take ‘em!”
Just then Marc popped a youth cowboy hat onto Grayson’s head. It’s a wide-brim straw just like the rodeo cowboys wear. It’s the perfect topper to an big day between father and son.
I hope one day in the far future, though I’m learning every day that this day will happen much sooner than either of us realize, Grayson looks in his closet and finds a worn-out pair of bull hide Ariats or crocodile Luccheses as he reaches for his own. I hope that by that time that I’ve been a strong enough man, I’ve touched enough lives, created enough happiness and most importantly been a good enough father that he realizes, just like I have this morning as I sat down to write this looking at my own father’s boots, that those are some big boots to fill.
