“PROSSER WAS OUR JOHN WAYNE. BUT AT THE SAME TIME, HE HAD THIS CHILDLIKE QUALITY. HE WAS LIKE A BIG KID HIS WHOLE LIFE.”
— MARTIN WARDLAW
“If made of leather, we make it”
The late Prosser Martin of Del Rio, Texas, first crossed my radar in the 1980s, when I read a book about Dr. John R. Brinkley, the border townʼs notorious Goat Gland Man and radio station tycoon of the 1930s. “Prosser Martin, the nationʼs most widely recognized cowboy outfitter and dealer in fancy saddles and leather goods, once made a traveling bag for the doctor,” wrote Gerald Carson in The Roguish World of Doctor Brinkley. “It was a fancy job. A Masonic-lodge emblem was hand-tooled on one side. The doctorʼs radio station call letters were outlined in silver wire on the other.”
When Dr. Brinkley asked the price of the completed bag, Martin told him, “Well Doctor, you charge $750 for one operation. Iʼm just going to operate on you for one operation.”
While Brinkley became (and remains) famous as the surgeon who developed an oddball medical procedure known as the Goat Gland Transplant (an early agricultural version of Viagra), a visitor to Martinʼs saddle and cowpoke emporium during its run from the early 1920s to his retirement in 1961, would have marveled at the images of his much more famous friends that filled the walls. He made saddles for singing cowboys, for movie stars and rodeo champs, and for presidents of the U.S. and Mexico. An in-demand rodeo announcer, he enlivened cowboy tournaments from the dustiest one-horse Texas towns all the way to Madison Square Garden.
As one reporter noted in 1936, “He carries the cowboy vernacular as do few persons in the country.”
In the 1990s, legendary Del
