JACK ROWIN:  THE “BOOT MAKER”

Jack Rowin, who died in 2015, was the kind of legendary guy who should be making boots for all of us.

An Oklahoma native, Jack Rowin ended up in Roswell, New Mexico, with his family when their truck gave out en route to California in the Dust Bowl years. There, Rowin caught the rodeo bug during high school. He moved to California and worked at several Santa Barbara County ranches until 1980, when he was injured in a riding accident.  Rowin then spent a year at a boot shop in Bakersfield learning the trade before opening the business out of his house in the tiny town of Manton, California.

How did Rowin make some of the finest boots on the planet? He began by having the customer place one stocking foot on each half of an opened manila folder, then traced the feet and took a half-dozen measurements. Next he placed his hands on each foot, moving his fingers slowly over the bumps and curves. Why? “I’m memorizing your foot” . After the time-consuming process of fashioning the last, a wood-and-leather model of the customer’s foot around which the boot is molded, Rowin moved on to finishing the leather. Depending on the stitching, inlays, or overlays requested, a pair of boots took Rowin between 20 and 50 hours to complete.

Rowin liked to tell this story.  “This old cowboy ordered a pair and came around on a Friday to pick them up. He tried them on and thought they felt good,” Rowin recalled. “Then on Monday, he calls me and says, ‘Jack, I think these boots might be a little tight.’ I asked, ‘What happened since last Friday?’ He said, ‘Well, I woke up about 2 A.M. and turned to my wife and said, ‘Honey, these boots don’t feel right.’ I said, ‘You mean to tell me you wore those boots two and a half days without taking them off?’ He said, ‘Jack, if a man can’t sleep in a pair of boots, they just don’t fit.’ ”

Simply known as the “Boot Maker,” Jack’s boots were a piece of Americana.