Trading in Hides and Leather
After working for 55-plus years in the hide and leather business, Andy Barta knows a thing or two about weathering the ups and downs of the trade. His hands-on confrontations with adversity and his knack for bouncing back with fortitude, began for real in December 1955, one year after his father had launched the rawhide enterprise, George Barta Hide Company in Petaluma, California.
That year, severe floodwaters swept through the region. “We had to get into swimming outfits to fish out hides from the Petaluma River,” Barta, 75, vividly recalled. “The river was not far from the warehouse.”
At the time, he was just nine years old, but the sudden crisis revealed his dad’s strong-willed character. “He was very determined. A couple of years later, my father found a good niche in sheepskins. He knew how to grade them. He had customers in Europe and got into the export business.”
George Barta is a native of Budapest, Hungary. In 1948, he fled the country’s dire economic and political situation with his wife, Anna, and their two sons, two-year-old Andy and his younger brother, Leslie. The family first retreated to Austria. “In post-WWII communist Hungary, a small hide business like my father had there couldn’t survive,” his son explained. In 1951, the family gained entry into the United States.
