George Hurst had a lifetime of stories: some tales of innovations in the leather industry, some lessons of struggle over his 89 years, and others, just accounts of a life well lived.
George was born in New Berlin, Pennsylvania, and was raised on a tomato farm that supplied produce for the Chef Boyardee plant. Although he dabbled in leather work in Boy Scouts, it wasn’t until his senior year of high school that he really got interested. At the time, he only had one thing on his mind: going to Penn State to play football. However, he wasn’t enrolled in enough classes to graduate, so he took industrial arts. The new shop instructor had just gotten out of an Army hospital where he had been doing leathercraft for several years, and George fell in love with it.
