Only In Texas

Things like this are part of the reason I love living in Texas.

Hats Help Uncover Cowboys' Stories

It was sometime back in the late 1980s that Stewart Martin, owner of Ben's Western Wear on Front Street (in Cotulla), hung the first beat-up old cowboy hat in a place of honor, high up on the wall among the pale trophy-buck mounts.

No one now recalls which hat was first, but it proved to be a good idea. Customers would remark on the cowboy who had worn that hat, the horses he had ridden and the work he had done. And other hats soon followed.

“Stewart was real proud of the hats. His theory was that everyone's hat was important to them. His goal was to write a story every month about a person whose hat was hanging on the wall, but he passed away in November of 2006,” said his widow, Jill, who runs the store.

“He was a people person. He used to tell me, ‘I maybe didn't make a lot of money in my life, but I can measure my wealth in my friends.'”

Now there are more than 400 hats on the walls, mostly battered Stetsons and Resistols, each with a name tag. An additional 100 hats are waiting in storage because of a lack of space. And if all their stories were told, it would make a nice history of this part of South Texas.

A few hat stories did get written. One of the favorites was provided by Scott Reese, a rancher from Encinal, who donated an old chewed-up gray Resistol. In 1975, Reese had given it to his ranch foreman, Mario Rodriguez.

“Mario wore it every day and made repairs on the hat as needed. On one occasion, while he was plowing a field, a gasket blew out on an old Ford tractor. With South Texas ingenuity, he cut a piece of felt out of the back of his trusty old hat and used it for the gasket,” Martin wrote.

“The repair was done over 15 years ago, and it still works today,” he concluded.

Among the many hats are a handful donated by politicians, country music stars, Texas Rangers and other celebrities, including one by U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who once hunted around here.

Hats bearing the names of George Strait, Rick Perry and Nolan Ryan are on the wall above the Jockey underwear display. And Dolph Briscoe's cracked old straw lid is right above the Carhartt work jackets.

I used to go hunting on a lease near Briscoe's ranch in Uvalde. We'd see him in town once in a while. He looked like any other rancher, not like a governor of Texas. And certainly not like Captain Perfect-Hair, pretty boy Rick Perry.

And while a few other names are recognizable to anyone who spent a few years roaming South Texas, most of the hats belonged to ordinary working men known only to their families, friends and fellow cowpokes.

“Most of these guys worked on ranches all their lives. These are the real cowboys from the old days. You can tell by the way their hats are all creased and sweaty and wore out,” said Carlos Gonzalez Jr., 55, who has worked here for two decades.

His son, who was a pretty fair roper, has his hat on the wall.

Some of the hats are probably 50 to 60 years old. And while Jill Martin says she has a good idea of where most of them came from, sometimes she doesn't know much about all their owners.

“We have never turned a hat down. I wonder about some of them. I'm not vouching for their character, they've just got their hats hanging up here,” she joked.

One of the oddest is one painted orange on the top, and not as an expression of humor.

“That one belonged to Bob Davis. It was his hunting hat. And he didn't want to get shot,” Martin said.

Business was slow Friday afternoon, and customer Darrell Burnett, 47, of Van Alstyne took his time looking through the hat collection, finding names of cowboys he had known of in North Texas and elsewhere.

“There's Jim Wright of the American Quarter Horse Association. He was a field inspector for 50 years. Harry Thompson, a PRC bull rider. And Phil Lyne, the greatest cowboy ever,” he said.

“A lot of history. It's just cool,” he said.

Elsa Ayala, who has worked at Ben's for 30 years, said people still come back to show friends and family members a favorite hat. Sometimes they ask that it be lifted down from the wall so they can take their picture with it.

But then the hat always goes back to its place of honor.

“Stewart always said that anyone is more than welcome to take a hat back, anytime, but no one ever has,” she said.

My first - and only - custom cowboy hat was made for me by Manny Gammage of Texas Hatters, back when I lived in Austin. It's a great hat, but unfortunately my head has grown since then, so it doesn't fit right anymore. Maybe one of these days I'll get around to seeing if it can be stretched (the hat, not my head).