Pablo Jass Senior

Why collectors care

Pablo Jass, often styled Pablo Jass Senior in collector writing, is a living one-man Lampasas bench. Collectors meet his pairs beside Ray Jones because the construction grammar can rhyme, yet the two makers are not interchangeable. Attribution usually rests on paperwork, shop geography, and the absence of a factory logo.

He belongs under Bootmakers, not under boot manufacturing companies. Jass Boot Shop is a single bench, not a production house.

Biography

Edward Loya’s Illume Connect profile of 31 October 2021 records that Pablo was born on 4 February 1949 in Lampasas, Texas, to Pedro, originally from Bertram, and Guadalupe, originally from McGregor. The family included two daughters and seven sons. Brothers Mike and John Jass later became bootmakers on their own benches.

After graduating from Lampasas High School in May 1968, he was drafted into the Marine Corps on 6 February 1969. Illume states that he deployed to Da Nang on 7 August 1969 as a Private First Class infantry rifleman, was wounded on 10 September 1969, received the Purple Heart, and was honorably discharged on 6 March 1970. Workbook Weekly (24 October 2024) and Tadd Myers’s 2024 shop visit also describe the Vietnam return and Purple Heart before the Ray Jones years.

Illume dates his first day at Jones’s shop to 2 October 1971, after a short job as a Lampasas meter reader at $1.00 an hour. The boot-shop wage was $1.25. The Killeen Daily Herald of 28 March 2011 quotes the same ask in Pablo’s words: “I just went and asked old Ray for a job.” He assembled soles and shanks and shaped heels in Jones’s assembly line, and Illume estimates that he helped Jones finish more than 11,000 pairs over about eleven years.

On 2 October 1982, five months before Jones closed, Pablo opened Jass Boot Shop on the Lampasas Square. Illume says he took over Tony Sanchez’s repair-shop lease after Joaquin Medina could not raise the money and paid Sanchez $5,000 for equipment. He kept working for Jones through the 18 March 1983 closing, then took Jones clients after Elizabeth Jones began referring them. In April 1984 he moved the shop to 803 East Avenue G, a former grocery one block from his childhood home. The 7 October 2012 Herald marked forty-two years of bootmaking and thirty years of shop ownership and printed the same Avenue G address.

Mike and John worked with him at the opening and left after a couple of years to open their own shops. Illume records that his former wife Juanita stitched tops for about two decades and that, since about 2005, Pablo has done all of the work, including top stitching. Daughter Elisa Jass spoke at the 2012 celebration. Tadd Myers photographed the still-active shop in 2024.