“The Michelangelo of Cowboy Boots”
Perched all pretty on the Colorado River, where the limestone hills of Central Texas tumble down from the west to meet the Blackland prairie from the east, the city of Austin has changed a lot since I first laid eyes on it in the 1960s.
I’ll know for sure, though, that the place has devolved to high-tech heck if they ever take down the giant cowboy boot that has adorned a Lavaca Street building since.…well, it seems like ever since Davy Crockett played his last fiddle tune at the Alamo back in 1836.
The boot once marked the Capitol Saddlery. Rodeo star Buck Steiner opened the boots-and-saddles emporium around 1930, and the legendary Charlie Dunn built boots for Buck from 1949 to 1974. Charlie’s bootmaking career at Capitol Saddlery and elsewhere spanned some 80 incredible years. Singer Jerry Jeff Walker made Dunn extra famous in 1972 with an eponymous ditty about the diminutive bootmaker “with the smilin’ leathery face.”
“Charlie Dunn,” Walker crooned. “He’s the one to see.” Thousands of satisfied boot wearers, many of whom surely treasure their custom Dunns today, 27 years after Charlie’s death, know that the song sang true.
Folks who knew Charlie describe him as “leprechaun-like.…mischievous.…with a twinkle in his eye.” His former apprentice and bootmaking-heir-designate Lee Miller recalls that the beret-clad bootmaker “played the part of a Picasso.” Austin native Don Hyde, who first met Charlie in 1953 when Hyde was five years old, asked his dad “if Charlie was one of Santa’s elves.”
Charlie Dunn’s life unrolls like a heartland yarn spun by Mark Twain. Born on an Arkansas riverboat in 1898, he came from a long line of bootmakers that stretched back to his ancestors in Ireland. When Charlie was three, the Dunn family—which eventually included at least nine children—headed west by covered wagon. A new century filling the horizon before them, they settled for a time in the Texas hamlet of Glory, just south of the Red River and near the somewhat larger town of Paris.
At age seven, Charlie told hordes of reporters he became an apprentice in the Parisian shop of
