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Saturday mornings in Sierra Vista, Arizona, just east of Ft. Huachuca, I'd leave my rented trailer and walk to Dan Dutton's Boot & Shoe Repair Shop. Frank A. Dutton, Dan's father, was already there, tearing down the day's army or cowboy boots. The smell of barge glue and the lit end of a Lucky Strike couldn't cover the stink of old manure-soaked leather or GI socks' dried sweat. Judge Frank A. Dutton didn't need to worry about the smell as the buffer and sanding wheels powdered scorched hides. As the judge of Tombstone, Arizona, with an office next to the contraband room full of confiscated pot and bales or kilos of marijuana, he spent his early morning hours at the shop as his son's employee. He chuckled, "It's the only way we can get along, as long as he's the boss." Judge Frank Dutton had learned the shoe and boot repair craft far away from Sierra Vista, as a youngster in Denton, Texas. The door's cowbell clanged as it opened and shut again. "Morning, Sir!" "Good morning, Jim. Whatcha goin' to make today?" Saturdays were my day off. I could choose pieces of golden latigo scraps, which Dan manufactured into several styles of women's purses. I had begun to use small leather panels to texture on sidewalk cracks or surfaces of rough texture on river rocks in the dry wash beside the store's strip mall. I answered Judge Dutton, "Thought I'd pound some cracks and paint another set of Native American portraits." "Well, if Miss Cook keeps coming in to buy the ones you did last week of the Indian kids, you'll have to make a dozen or so." I was surprised. Looking along the shelves of purses where I'd stood up the previous works, sure enough, they were gone. They were only water-color-brushed leather dyes onto latigo scraps, which I tacked onto weathered scraps of driftwood found in the dry creekbed. These pictures were barely silhouettes of Indian kids, maidens, old folks, and landscapes. That someone thought enough of them as art work pieces worthy of collecting was a real boost to my self-esteem. Judge Dutton finished his Lucky Strike and began setting the new boot soles on with some hammer strokes around his shoe lasts. The barge glue sets just about right in the time it took to smoke his cigarette. (The leather dust had filled up his chest. Not long after this, he passed over.) But on that Saturday, I picked out a few foreleg or neck scraps and headed outside for a stroll along the dry creek bed. Careful not to cross paths with a coiled rattler warming up in the morning sun, I found some likely rocks to imprint the latigo scraps. I was startled as an old desert prospecting geezer put his gnarled hand on my shoulder. "Howdy, squirt! Wondered if you'd be interested in some trinkets I found." We'd met before in Dutton's neighbor's antique shop. His treasure maps of lost mines could have filled several story books. "Judge Dutton told me where to find you." In his scarred and weatherbeaten grasp was a couple of ornamental brass backplates from some lost chests of drawers. In his other hand he had hold of maybe two-thirds of an antique mirror frame. It was blackened with age and the shellac finish was checked like square rattlesnake scales. "How much?" I asked. "Ten bucks will get me a shack and breakfast." I knew he meant it, but I let loose of a twenty, with a shared smile as his closed hand rubbed the back of his month-old whiskered chin and mouth. It was a dry scraping sound that trembled from a lot of damaged nerves, probably from cutting wood and lumber for years with a carpenter's crosscut saw. Its sound also resembled his voice--kind of parched and needing something better than water or soda pop to quench weeks of high and lonesome. Hardly a month later, a pretty lady from Denton, Texas came into the shop at Dan's store. At the end of another week, I said goodbye to Dan and his Pop. The lady and I packed my few belongings--including the broken mirror frame--on a $300 auctioned Ford OD pickup and headed east through Tombstone and north to Duncan, Arizona, where I stopped long enough to visit my grandparents' graves. The lady, named Judy, and I arrived in Denton, Texas on the evening of July 2, 1974. It wasn't long before I repacked the mirror frame and less after most of my good tools were pawned. Judy's husband had come back from Vietnam. Neither of us wanted to see more blood, so I left and camped on the north shore of Lake Grapevine till I found a Denton cottage and outhouse to rent as a hideout. High Doubts is the truer definition. The portion of two garden sheds where the shower and toilet were, also made do as a workshop space. There I made orders from weekends at a Lewisville flea market. During one rainy September storm, I picked off the wood carvings from the mirror frame. I carefully laid each piece next to the other on a small tabletop draped over with a scrap of garment leather. Looking up once from the task, I broke off one of the finely carved edges of a piece that looked like water. When I set it with the previous pieces, I was struck by the way a design was forming. After I finished removing the final piece, the graphic, simple beauty of a crest-like emblem lay before my view--Future's Child, suede, valentine-shaped, yet womb-like; pains like birth, a fetal-shaped piece reminded me of a child, and the center piece made me think of Spirit and Diety. Within a year I was a newly-wed. Within three years I was to become a father. My Future's Child wood and leather collage was once entered in a Denton arts show. After a winter snowstorm I managed to capture a black and white Kodak photo of it before I accidentally spilled alcohol onto the panel while trying to clean the exhibit. Years of blackened shellac peeled away. The now-stripped-clean wood pieces were hand-carved white oak. What I'd first thought was old varnish turned out to be pure 1800s shellac. The accident with the alcohol wouldn't have fazed later 1800s oil varnishes, but it melted the shellac right off. I had orders to make hand-stitched leather hats. I wanted something distinctive to make an emblem in a satin hat liner. I was told, "All you need is a black and white photo and a company in Philadelphia will make a print block with a magnesium-shim die on the face." It worked great. The owner of the hat liner company printed black satin with gold crests. We later changed over to the original Stetson red remnant bolts of silk. The crest on the website has a long history. A drug dealer once offered to buy it for a grocery sack full of pot. I refused. He said, "But I want to hang it up in my new bar." "Sorry," I apologized. "It's my family coat of arms." I almost died from a shot of his poisoned rot-gut one night. He disappeared mysteriously the next week, after we'd returned from a St. Louis International Hobby Association of America market show in 1979. |
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-- Jim Matheson |
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