HAPPY 100TH BIRTHDAY TANDY LEATHERCRAFT! A Tandy-tastic Century
What’s the first thing folks think of when they hear the word leathercraft? I’d just about bet the farm that, from Tucumcari to Timbuktu, most folks think of Tandy. Headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas, the company with more than 100 retail leathercraft stores across the U.S. and overseas, turns 100 years young in 2019.
In addition to celebrating the big birthday with a company-wide hoorah in Cowtown—I mean Fort Worth—in late August, the long-time leather world leader is set to launch the inaugural edition of what will become an annual tradition, National Leathercraft Day on August 15.
The Tandy story is a grand and dandy tale of inspiring generations in the practical and therapeutic applications of crafting useful—and beautiful—items from leather. Absolutely. But, it’s also a story of people. It’s a story of creativity, ingenuity, vision and drive ...a story of folks with boundless energy and big ideas.
Company founder Dave Tandy (1889-1966) spent his earliest years in the Chisholm Trail town of Meridian, south of Fort Worth. Though the cattle drive era had ended years earlier, the soulful creak of punchers’ boots and saddles still echoed through the community’s identity. Another Meridian youth, John Avery Lomax, grew up to be the famed “Ballad Hunter,” a pioneer documentarian of cowboy songs.
“[He was] a man of vigor and vision, but above all he was a salesman… a game he loved and played his entire life.”
—Jim West observing Dave Tandy
Working in his father’s A. N. Tandy’s Meridian mercantile, thrifty Dave Tandy banked as much as 50 cents a week, eyeing the time when he would be grown and could go into business for himself. That drive was amplified in the early 20th century, after A. N. moved the family to the Rio Grande Valley, where the Brownsville Herald later memorialized him as “the father of the Valley’s vast vegetable industry.” Finding farm work not his cup of tea, Dave moved to Temple, Texas, after high school graduation and began charting his future course with employment as a salesman in a local shoe emporium.
Shortly after marrying a young lady to whom he’d sold a pair of shoes, Dave lost his job when the Temple store went out of business. Trying his luck in the bigger city of Dallas, he landed a traveling sales job in the shoe-findings department of the famed outfit Padgitt Brothers Co., Manufacturers and Jobbers of Saddles, Harness, Horse Collars, Leather, Saddlery Hardware, and Shoe Findings.
When his brothers had to leave home to serve during World War I, Dave returned to the Rio Grande Valley to help his father run the farm. After the war, he went into the shoe-findings business himself, forming the Hinckley-Tandy Leather Company, in partnership with his former boss, Norton Hinckley. Setting up headquarters in downtown Fort Worth, the partners sold sole leather and other shoe supplies.
As Irvin S. Farman points out in his 1992 opus, Tandy’s Money Machine, Fort Worth in the early 1920s was booming as a business hub for the roaring gushers of the region’s oil industry. (Interestingly, Farman also authored the 1997 book, Standard of the West: The Justin Story. Yep, it’s that Justin.) Hinckley-Tandy grew steadily, but modestly. A second location opened in Beaumont in 1927 and moved to Houston in 1932. Jim West, who one day would ascend to the presidency of Tandy Corporation, joined the team to run the Gulf Coast operations. Of Dave, West once observed that the Tandy founder was “a man of vigor and vision, but above all he was a salesman…a game he loved and played his entire life.”
The Great Depression years of the 1930s, of course, required any business person to adapt with vigor and vision simply to stay afloat in such lean times. Dave, a natural people-person with a dynamic zest for civic and company boosterism, responded brilliantly. A dip into Fort Worth papers of the era reveal
