In 1883 Sam Lucchese immigrated to the United States from Sicily.  Along with his two brothers Joe and Mike, he began shoemaking in San Antonio until they all had enough money to open their own boot factory.

“They got to San Antonio primarily because Fort Sam Houston was such a big Army post.  There were lots of boots sold.  It was a big railhead for cattle coming up from the King Ranch and the surrounding area to be transported on to Kansas.  So this was a good place to be.” –Sam Lucchese, Jr.[1]

The only surviving records from this time are measurements of feet.  Sam had each customer sign their measurements serving as a form of written contract.  At one point he purchased another shoe shop.

“He must have bought the man’s shop in the form of his customer’s measurements.  There is not much else of value in a custom shoe shop.  There was not a lot of machinery- maybe a little leather and some lasts.”

Over time the brothers built up their business.  Sam was a very practical boot builder, emphasizing both quality and the production process.  He was always eager to implement the newest machines and techniques to increase production.

“If my grandfather had lived longer or had been a half a generation younger we would have been running a shoe factory because the shoe or the boot was a commercial product to my grandfather.  It was something he could make money doing.”

In the years leading up to World War I the Lucchese Boot and Shoe Factory employed between forty to fifty workers and made between twenty-five to thirty pairs of boots a day.  The product was catered towards well-off clientele.  As Sam became more successful he began to acquire real-estate.

“At one time he could not get a location for his boot shop on Houston Street, which was the main street in town but there was a man who owned a theater and wanted to sell it.  So my grandfather bought the theater, ripped out all the seats, tore out all the equipment, and put his shoe shop in there.”

He then purchased another piece of property and built a theater there.  He installed the theater equipment inside and hired the Carlos Villalongin Dramatic Company from Mexico to perform. The Lucchese family thus entered the theater business.  Eventually they would run two theaters under the management of one of Sam’s seven children.  During the 1920s these theaters were an integral part of the San Antonio entertainment scene.  During this time of expansion the boot business continued to thrive and grow.

Sam Lucchese loved to play dominos and bocce.  He was a great gardener: corn, peas, celery, and asparagus were all things he grew.  He also tended grapevines and had peach, fig, and pecan trees.  In 1923 he had a stroke and was forced to relinquish the day-to-day operations of Lucchese Boots over to his son Cosimo.  In 1929 he suffered from a fatal stroke during a game of dominoes.

1923- Cosimo Lucchese

Cosimo Lucchese (born 1900) learned boot making as a teenager while working at his father’s company, The Lucchese Boot and Shoe Factory.  In 1921, around the time of his marriage, he had a disagreement with Sam and went off to open his own shop.  He returned to take over the Lucchese Shop in 1923 when his father had a stroke.

While Sam emphasized production of boots in quantity, Cosimo concentrated on quality and craftsmanship.  This focus along with the Great Depression led to a drop in production volume.  Sam, Jr. recounted that while working as a boy in the shop often only six to eight pairs would be made each day.

“Business fell off.  Since there was no need to make so many boots we let some boot keepers go.  We sold a boot making machine.  We could do it by hand for the few pairs that were ordered.  We ended up going backwards from a production standpoint… and yet it was the cause of our progression on the quality basis.”

The higher quality and the slower pace combined to demand higher prices and it was Sam, Jr.’s task to inquire diplomatically how much price mattered to the customer before Cosimo began working on the boot order.  There was to be no compromise for quality.

“In fact, he felt a pair of boots he made belonged to him until he decided that they fit you properly and that they looked good on your feet.  His only advertisement was his product.  His boots looked so good that his friends could not stand it until they got a pair.”

Cosimo worked in the boot shop twelve hours a day, seven days a week.  His shoemakers, primarily Mexican, loved him dearly.

“They had a special rapport.  I got along with them, but they loved him.  There was a difference.  They were always borrowing money.  He lent them money no matter when- even in the middle of the night to get them out of jail.”

Thanks to the exceptional quality of the Lucchese boots, the business held on through the Depression and World War II.  After the war the business rapidly expanded.  Lucchese was selling boots to presidents, billionaires, movie stars.  Cosimo became a local celebrity.  Cosimo concentrated on making boots, leaving all the business details to Sam, Jr.  The orders were coming in faster than they could fill them.

“He was nine months behind in delivery but he just spent nine months getting them made.  He would come in the morning and say, ‘Sam we are going to raise the price on our boots.  We are selling too many and we cannot watch that many closely enough.’  If they were not selling too good, he would lower the price.  He played it like a violin.”

1961- Sam Lucchese, Jr.

Sam Lucchese, Jr. worked in his father’s shop growing up.  He handled the business side of the Lucchese Boot Company while Cosimo made the boots.  Sam, Jr. graduated from Alamo Heights High School and attended the University of Texas at Austin before serving in the Navy during World War II.  In 1945 he rejoined the company.

At the time the product line was exclusively custom boots.  A fee was charged for the first pair, the last, and the pattern.

“We figure about twenty-four man hours in a pair of personal boots.  These are not the fancy ones.  There are some that we will spend eighty or one hundred hours just in making the fancy works and stitching in the tops of them.  In one case we made the boots for Anne Baxter and we had to get the tanners to make the leather in certain colors because she wanted butterflies inlaid all over them.”

In 1957 Sam, Jr. left Lucchese for as a job as a traveling salesman for the Acme Boot Company.  His reason for leaving was because he needed more money to provide for his three children.  When his father died in 1961 he returned and bought the company from his stepmother.

“My father knew no grades or classes of people.  One of his most magnificent characteristics to me was that he would treat Rockefeller, Lyndon Johnson, Gene Autry exactly the same as he would treat Juan Hernandez or any beggar or waiter.  That was a wonderful characteristic.”

His goal was to expand the business into ready-made boots though it would require a huge investment in leather, lasts, and most importantly, marketing.  As a custom shop there was not much in the way of assets beyond a loyal customer base, so the decision was made to branch out into western ready-wear clothes and hats.  These were distributed to retailers around the country.

Sam kept working on the idea of ready-made boots, however.  The challenge became the translation of the custom fit Lucchese boot into a standardized sizing system.  He came across a study on foot dynamics from the University of Rochester’s School of Medicine.

“The idea of it was that people are like horses in that they have a gait.  Their feet may be the same size but because Charlie walks with a certain gait, he is going to wear his shoes differently.  Sitting him down and measuring his feet in a static position does not provide comfort or support or what is generally put under the big umbrella of ‘fit’.”

For six years they studied the gait problem.  Feet were measured with profile and contour gauges, while pedograph prints were utilized to develop a method of predicting gait and creating lasts that were shaped like feet.  Eventually they came up with a set of categories for any given size which would deliver the Lucchese fit by accommodating the dynamics of each foot.

In 1969 Sam, Jr. began consulting with Wrangler on how to improve their popular-priced ready-made line of boots.  He convinced them to apply his dynamic fit ideas to their product line- retooling an entire factory in the process.

“In June of 1970 the people at Wrangler decided that the best thing for us to do was merge.  Have you ever seen a big fish swallow a little minnow?  That was the case.  ‘Merge’ is hardly the word and nothing could have made me happier.”

Thus began the corporate era of Lucchese boots.  Blue Bell, the parent company of Wrangler, took over Lucchese’s debts and obligations and began paying a decent salary to Sam, Jr. who was able to convince them to keep their custom boot operation going.

“I just delivered boots this past month to Gene Autry, Dan Blocker, Lorne Green. This is not going to hurt my image and it does not hurt Blue Bell’s image.  So we do not want to quit this business.  I have under this roof what I truly believe to be the finest group of shoemakers congregated anywhere and I do not want to see those boot makers scattered all over.”

1970- The Corporate Era

After he sold the Lucchese Boot Company to Blue Bell in 1970, Sam Lucchese, Jr. was brought on staff and put in charge of the whole boot making operation.  He oversaw both the Wrangler brand and the new, untested Lucchese brand of ready-wear boots.  The main question was how much people were willing to pay for a boot off the shelf.

“We took two retail managers from Blue Bell and we gave them a line of samples and sent them out on the road.  That was in late June.  Thirty days later they had sold our entire production up to the first of January.  We had to pull them back in.”

In 1971 Sam, Jr. was awarded the Designers Award by the Leather Industries of America.  In 1977 he went to work for the Tony Lama Company.  He died in 1980.

“There is something about the boot business that hooks you.  I tried in every way in the world to get away from it.  It just gets into your blood.  Once you get hooked on it you just keep coming back.”

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[1] All quotes from Sam Lucchese, Jr., grandson of Sam Lucchese, Sr.

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