A Boot Collector Feature
A dry-goods dynasty and a saddlemaking cowboy legend ran neighboring shops in the Fort Worth Stockyards for decades before joining names on one storefront — the same joint mark still stamped inside boots today.
Luskey's arrived first. A. Luskey, a Russian immigrant, opened a general dry-goods store in downtown Fort Worth in 1919, and the business grew into a genuine Texas chain, at one point running locations in cities including Abilene and Amarillo alongside Fort Worth. As other locations closed over the decades, the Fort Worth Stockyards store became the family's last one standing, a two-story building on North Main Street that turned into a Stockyards landmark in its own right.
Ryon's traces back even further, to a Fort Worth cattle-trading family: T.J. Ryon settled in the city in 1883 and worked as a cattle buyer once the stockyards opened in 1887. His grandson, Don Jackson Ryon Jr., known around the yards as "Windy" Ryon, bought an existing Stockyards saddle shop in December 1944, one that had belonged to the Edelbrock family, together with partner A. V. Atkins, a saddle maker with fifteen years in the trade. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram photographed the two new owners at the time; Ryon had worked for the stockyards before the purchase. The shop became Ryon's Saddle Shop and Western Store. It became as much a gathering place as a business, the kind of shop where working cowboys stopped to talk as much as to buy. After Windy Ryon's death, friends started the Windy Ryon Memorial Roping celebration in his honor in 1973; the event is still held today and now funds youth rodeo scholarships.
The two neighboring names joined in 1982, when Luskey's merged with Ryon's Saddle Shop to form Luskey's/Ryon's Western Wear, combining general Western outfitting with saddle and tack craftsmanship under one roof. The Luskey family's standing in the trade was formally recognized in 2018, when they were inducted into the Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame as honorees, among the first Jewish retailers so honored. In 2016, the family sold the store to Cavender's, a Tyler, Texas-based chain; co-owners Mike and Alan Luskey stayed on to manage the location, and Cavender's kept the building's historic exterior while updating the inventory inside. A separate Ryon family member, Sean Ryon, opened his own Sean Ryon Western Store & Saddle Shop nearby in 1989, continuing the family's saddlemaking name independently of the Luskey's storefront — worth knowing if you run across that name too, since it's a different, still-independent business today.
Between them, the two names covered the full range of what a working cowboy or a Stock Show visitor needed: Luskey's brought general Western retail, clothing, boots, and hats; Ryon's brought hands-on saddle and tack craftsmanship and a reputation as a place cowboys actually gathered rather than just shopped. That combination, run by two families with a century of Fort Worth history between them, is what made "Luskey's/Ryon's" worth stamping inside a boot in the first place.
The building is still there, the Luskey family is still behind the counter, and the Ryon name lives on both in the memorial roping and in a new generation's own saddle shop nearby — even if the sign out front now reads Cavender's.