Austin Connoisseur Episode “Vintage Boots” Evan Voyles: Most people look at boots and just assume whether they like them or not. And in fact that’s almost the best test for vintage boots. What kind of go me into it was that’s what I thought real cowboy boot looked like. It doesn’t look like I do much of anytime in this room but store stuff. But in fact I am a sign maker and an artist by trade. And this is where I build stuff. My name is Evan Voyles and I own, what seems to still be the largest vintage boot collection in the world, and I have 750 pairs. I don’t think anybody’s close and half of those were involved in a firm twelve years ago. So they are a little darker and crispier than they started out to be. I am not really keeping track. I am not trying to stay ahead. I jus haven’t heard of anything else. And I would want to know because I would probably want buy from them for stuff that they had. Or trade with them. A vintage boot, general we are talking about the nineteen thirties to the nineteen sixties. That some people call the golden age of cowboy boots. It was this period where western Americana sort of permeated the culture at large. You have to remember at the turn of the century, America became obsessed with the vanishing west. We win the war, we have got the most amazing economic machine the world had ever seen much less we have ever seen. And we were just not ten years ago starving. Down here we were definitely starving. And so we can do anything, and you see his explosion of products that are being crafted, and it is not just cowboy boots, it’s everything. And they are more colorful, they are more flashy, they are more streamlined than ever before. Forty six into he fifties we are like making the stuff, this is the stuff the world wants. And I think that’s what informed that, in some deep psychological level. To make them so colorful or to make them interesting was part of an American expression. I am from Austin, I was born and raise here. I left when I got out of high school and I didn’t really think I was coming back. I have lived on the east coast and I have lived on the west coast. I have been to every state in between. And I can find something nice to say about all of them. But this is where I ended up living. The main thing I liked about then and I like now about Austin is it’s a town full of possibilities, and it a town full of people who will support possibilities. It allows for oddball things, it embraces oddball things. It sustains oddball things. And I think we are the richer for it. I was starting to do a lot of traveling on the road and I was looking for old Navajo rugs and discovered that I was bout twenty year too late. What I found instead were great colorful cowboy boots. For nothing, nobody was interested. And I was thinking this is just as much folk art as Navajo rugs. I was driving around west Texas I was doing some estate work for my family and I just started buying up all the boot I could, sixty thousand mile of driving a year, back and forth across the country. Which inturn led me to be able to become a dealer to finance my habit. When I started collecting vintage boots, there were a lot available. For at least a year or so I thought I was the only person on the island and then like Robinson Caruso I found a footprint on the beach, and it was not mine. And all of us went out there and decimated a herd that it had taken years to build up. Or it hasn’t been replenished in the meantime. We really did hunt it to death. The thing I am known for is being able to identify boots that aren’t marked, because I became obsessed, because I was driving. In interviewing boot makers about well, was this you? When did you start doing that? Where did you learn it? I got to where then I could look at a pair of boots and be able to say oh yeah, that is definitely San Angelo and in fact that is a M.L. Letti as opposed to Mercer or opposed to a Stanley. The way car freaks can look at a great car at a distance and go that’s a FORD. If you wanted to look into buying vintage boots, I wouldn’t buy on EBay but it might be a good place to educate yourself about what you like. I men you can look for nothing. But I would try to find out if there was someplace you could see them live, on the ground. In Austin there are several places that sell them; fit is and condition are virtually everything. Unless you are going to put them on the nail, then you can buy them on eBay and it wont matter. You get what you see not necessarily what you pay for. Regarding fit, Allen Bell al boot maker in Abilene says I can fit your feet, but I can’t fit your mind. The idea that it is up here, not down at your feet, some people want them really tight , some people want them so loose that they can kick them off. That gets into what you want and knowing how to indentify what you want, for a lot of people that I hard to do. But if your toes are crunched under, if they are too short in other words, there is not damn thing you can do about that. Believe me I have tried everything short of sharpening the axe. You just don’t want to go there, it is not worth it. There is always another pair. I don’t wear vintage boots to wok anymore. I used to and I was wearing them out too fast. It is the equivalent of asking your grandfather to go man a fence with you. He knows how to do it, he is probably better at it than you, but you run the risk that he is going to have a heart attack. You should buy them for ceremonial occasions or to wear lightly. I have a wide ranging love o bots and there are things I appreciate bout all of them, even the ones that look like nothing. I have got boots in my collection I have there just because it has got an oddball repair. But to me that’s, I love it. So get what you love. I started collecting stuff when I was little kid, I would literally go out in the gravel driveway behind the house and I would pick up rocks that I thought were interesting. And I would pick up the ones that were special and I would put them in a shoe box. And it is funny watching my son now who is twenty months, not even two yet. And he is already picking up rocks, and I am thinking maybe all kids do this. Or maybe just my kids are doing to do this. And if he sees another one he doesn’t put these down he just shifts the two to his hand and goes for that one. That’s me ,and maybe that I all I am, is just a kid who cant put down the rocks and wants to pick up the next rock and wants to pick up the rock and go wow look. And there is another one. My name is Evan Voyles and I am a connoisseur.