Cosimo Lucchese

History

Cosimo Lucchese took over leadership of the family's San Antonio boot business, Lucchese, after his father, Salvatore ‘Sam’ Lucchese, suffered a stroke. Accounts place his return to the shop in 1923 and his incorporation of the Lucchese Boot Company in 1929; the company's own timeline instead dates Sam's death — while playing dominoes at home — to 1929, with Cosimo incorporating the business at that point. The two accounts fit together as a 1923 return followed by a 1929 incorporation rather than contradicting each other outright.

Sam Lucchese's 1988 book, A Lifetime with Boots, says Cosimo had already opened his own shoe-repair shop before coming back after his father's stroke. A grandson is quoted contrasting the two men: his grandfather, Sam, treated bootmaking as commercial production, while ‘Papa [Cosimo] was in love with the beauty of the product.’ Cosimo was remembered as a perfectionist who drummed in last-making and pattern-making, though his grandson never saw him draw a design out on paper; production was not brought back to its earlier scale after the Depression.

Cosimo died in 1960, according to both Wikipedia and the company's own timeline, both of which describe his son, Samuel J. Lucchese, carrying the craft forward afterward.