Mike Vaughn

History

Mike Vaughn is a custom bootmaker in Bowie, Texas. In a 25 April 2019 interview, he said he started at 15 in a high-school work program at a repair shop run by Jack Bramhall and his son Jeff, then saw an NBC story about brothers Clyde and Joe Vasquez making boots upstairs at M.L. Leddy’s. He was hired after Joe walked him through the shop and shop owner Wilson Franklin agreed; Vaughn says he was 17 when he started working upstairs, among men in their sixties to late seventies, and that he went out on his own at 23. At the time of the interview he said he was 53.

Other profiles, from the Waggoner Ranch and the Colorado River Land Trust, also describe him as a Bowie bootmaker trained by the Vasquez brothers, but place his start in a high-school work program directly in the Vasquez shop and describe the brothers as having “gone on to work” for Leddy’s — a somewhat different sequence than Vaughn’s own account, which keeps the Bramhall repair-shop job and the Leddy’s bench separate.

Sources

• Mike Vaughn interview, The Cowboy Bootmakers, 25 April 2019
• Jan Batts / Cowboys of the Waggoner Ranch, “Meet the Makers: Mike Vaughn”
• Colorado River Land Trust, “Tough as Boots”