Craftsman makes his mark with leather

Bob Clark's face is seamed, like the seaman he's been. The last ten years, his full beard's been changing from black to silver and grey. His hands are heavy, hard and creased, like the leather he works.

His parking lot's gravel. So are the lanes stubbed to the little settlement of buildings laid out on the two acres he owns, where he lives by the road, earning his keep working for ranch hands and ropers, gunmen and mule men, barrel racers and horse trainers -- anybody needing anything done with leather. Not that many years back, he had to hunt work and when he found it, he delivered. Now it flows in the door. He doesn't have much competition.

Flush with federal funding associated with the Depression-era New Deal, in the 1930's the Texas Highway Department honed the route of U.S. 1 and changed the highway number to U.S. 67. East of Mt. Pleasant, where there was a truck stop until the opening of I-30, C & C trading Post and Saddle Shop Commander Bob Clark works in the old truck stop cafe. Maps from the 1930's in the Mt. Pleasant office of highway engineer Roger Ledbetter call for re-routing of U.S. 1 with construction of U.S. 67. The new route of the east-west highway that had funneled traffic past the El Moro Courts (See Bankhead Highway story) and up through the heart of the town was moved, taking a straight shot along the northern skirt of the town.It would be fair to say that 24-year-old Michael Mayben skipped childhood, it he hadn't been having so much fun taking on life as an adult for the past dozen years, at least when it come to business.

"I've got guys who drive fifty and seventy five miles to get here," he said.

Years ago, he was his own first customer. A left handed man in a right handed world, he wasn't surprised that he couldn't find a holster for a sidearm carried on his left side. He went down into Dallas, to a cobbler's shop on Irby Street. Instead of making him what he wanted, a guy there without the time took the time to show him how.

"I think about that man sometimes," Bob Clark said. "I wish I could go back and thank him."

Time was, he rented the place and his wife worked at a convenience store.

Dorothy Clark, like her husband, like the cobbler back on Irby Street - they're different, like most of the people he works for and trades with. He saves scraps for an artist who carves what's gotta be history's finest engraving in leather. Does it with a laser.

"It seems like what I do draws to or moves around people who really want to help anybody they see that they can," he says, understanding that makes a man lucky.

The best mornings, he's in his shop by the highway before daylight, putting quiet, focused hours into his work. Leather's not cheap, and if you think about it, it's as easy as you'd figure to make a wrong cut thinking your way through a left handed gun holster. You pay attention, when you've paid dues in $10 days.

The shop was a concrete block diner when U.S. 67 was the highway, a part of the truck stop that's now the used car lot next door. The complex included a plain-frame "bunkhouse" the size of a double garage. Corrugated sheet iron is wrapped around the sawmill oak skeleton of another building, the roadside tire shop from 60 years back.

The road's older still. Eisenhower was a tank commander just back from the first World War when he rode by, part of a military convoy congress wanted to drive The Bankhead Highway coast to coast.

Leaving Washington June 14, 1920, a convoy of 192 men aboard 50 trucks and automobiles took 111 days making a 4,500-mile drive. Its report dovetails perfectly with the Bankhead Highway Association literature declaring the route passable at all times of year, but the army gave more information. Be prepared to dig out of mud in the east and sand in the west, the army advised.

With the demonstrated value of convoy transports in the just-ended war, the military was interested in a transcontinental road as a means to deploy troops and munitions for defense. The President said a road spanning the continent could only benefit the regional exchange of ideas and collective thinking inherent in democratic government. General Drake of the Motor Transportation Corps saw the trip as a chance to study vehicle maintenance. Washington politicians saw it as a chance to generate publicity for legislation concerning highway construction.

The convoy got to California October 2, 1920. But back in Washington, Sen. Charles Townsend's bill to create a National Highway Commission failed. The next year, 1921, Washington passed The Federal Highway Act, providing federal funding to state highway departments with the stipulation that a fixed portion of the money be dedicated to creation of a road system "interstate in character."

By the early 1930's the road following the ancient Choctaw Trace across Franklin County, coming from the west into Mt. Pleasant along the route of present-day Farm to Market 899, had become U.S. 1.

In the last half of the 1930's, fueled by Depression-era work programs, Texas Department of Transportation engineers refined the route through East Texas and the road became U.S. 67.

A city kid passed on to a grand parents farm, Bob Clark drove this highway for the first time back in the 1960's, looking for an interstate shot to the northeast, steaming toward his old coast guard post on the Great Lakes, back in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin.

Six years in the service, and he dismissed his time on the Great Lakes, opting instead to comment on what oak's still solid in the frame of the old tire shop that was part of the Truck Oasis complex dating back to the 1950's.

"You couldn't drive a nail in that seasoned oak with a sledge," he said. When the building falls down, maybe somebody besides Bob Clark will look at it and think, "Ya know, they're not building these anymore."

These days, the sign out front, C & C Trading Post, is sort of a misnomer. In the evenings of those ten dollar days, he and his brother-in-law used to horse trade more, working anything from antique and junk auctions to flea markets and yard sales. Adjacent to the leather shop is a room full of evidence. Wooden ironing boards, ox blinders, lamps, lanterns and tools, pulleys and corn shellers, sewing machines, cotton pickers' sacks, a 1936 Texas Centennial License plate. Just ten years ago, "There was more of this stuff out there, more traders who had the kind of old things I like," he said. "We're living in a time when it's getting harder to find things that are really American - things made by craftsmen."

His slick palm slid around the crumbling collar of an old harness, dry rotted, functionally worthless, but all in one piece. One man's junk, another man's treasure. With the kinds of things he likes getting harder to find, his stuff isn't really for sale anymore, an evolving policy that sounds like it might have some slack in it.

"Now and then somebody like me walks in and wants to make an offer on everything," he said. "That kind of gets your attention."

That inventory spans time pushing about 200 years. One of the oldest pieces in the shop is a wooden saddle with a Spanish coin pressed into the horn. Now, like then, the "seat" is softened by an animal pelt thrown across the wooden frame. The stirrups are carved from wood blocks, made before the idea of bending wood for stirrups evolved, sometime after 1790, he says.

By the 1800's, Bob reasons, America's economy consumed leather the way it drinks up fossil fuels today.

"There would have been shops like mine everywhere," he said. "Everything that moved except trains and ships had to have a harness, a collar, a saddle, a bridle - something."

His respect for his customers is tangible. Soon, the region's top working cowboys will be riding horses sporting five breast collars he's made for event winners in the upcoming East Texas Ranch Rodeo Association finals.

"The people who want my work," he said, "tend to have style." They're individuals, as unique as the things Bob builds for them.

There's never a blue print - he's rebuilt antique saddles using remnants of rotted leather cut by another craftsman in another time as his pattern.

"You learn to be careful with old leather," he said. "Lots of times, it holds all the information you're going to get about what you need to do."

On the other hand, he's built gun holsters and saddle bags from photographs. He frequently works from memory. In some time yet to come, some future craftsman may well be tediously dismantling Bob Clark's work, carefully saving remnants of rotted leather cut by another craftsman in another time, saving his pattern.