A Boot Collector Feature

Charlie Garrison

The bootmaker who designed Roy Rogers’ famous Double-Eagle boots, and who was said to know some of his Hollywood customers by their boots alone.

The Story

Charlie Garrison learned bootmaking as a young man in Oklahoma. Around 1930 he moved to San Angelo, Texas, and opened the Texas Boot Shop, where he quickly made a name for himself. In the late 1930s he moved again, to Los Angeles, and his talent for intricate cowboy boots didn’t go unnoticed in Hollywood. Many regarded him as one of the world’s top bootmakers.

Roy Rogers was one of his biggest fans. Garrison designed Roy’s famous “Double-Eagle” boots, and Roy hired him to make all the special-order boots for the Roy Rogers Ranger Posts. His son Clarence, a bootmaker in his own right, worked alongside him and remembered the Ranger Post on Ventura Boulevard broadcasting a radio show every afternoon, with Roy, Dale Evans, or the Sons of the Pioneers singing for whoever walked in. Garrison also made boots for Nudie Cohn, the original rhinestone tailor, and for Nudie’s wife, Bobbie.

His clients included Roy Rogers, Rex Allen, Clark Gable, Johnny Mack Brown, and Chill Wills, and he knew his work so well that, the story goes, after a 1949 train wreck in Hollywood he identified the victim, an actor and square-dance caller from Western films, from the boots alone: “I’d know his boots anywhere.” In the 1950s Garrison left Hollywood and ran a boot shop in Llano, Texas, the Hill Country town where Jack Reed also kept a shop. He made boots there until he died in 1955.

Identifying His Boots

Garrison didn’t always sign his work, which has led to mix-ups. One unsigned pair of cowgirl boots, first attributed to Jack Reed, was later reattributed to Garrison by collectors who recognized his signature detail: a distinctive vamp tongue, the shape where the vamp meets the shaft at the front of the boot. If you have an unsigned Hollywood-era pair with elaborate work, that detail is worth comparing.