Rusty Franklin

Why collectors care

Rusty Franklin was a San Angelo custom bootmaker and grandson of M.L. Leddy. Collectors meet Leddy-like construction, Texas-icon tops, and later pairs from the shop that bought his lasts.

He belongs under Bootmakers. This card is not James Leddy in Abilene and not the living M.L. Leddy company in San Angelo and Fort Worth.

Biography

Texas Monthly (June 2002) listed Rusty Franklin Handmade Boots at 15 E. Avenue D, San Angelo, and said Franklin split from his grandfather M.L. Leddy sixteen years earlier — about 1986 if counted from that 2002 profile — and recruited master bootmaker Eugene Lopez from the late Charlie Garrison’s operation in Llano. Specialties included stiff tops, school logos, and Texas icons such as the Capitol, the Alamo, mockingbirds, oil derricks, yellow roses, and bluebonnets. Period figures started at $495 with a five-to-six-month turn. Named clients included Tommy Lee Jones and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones.

A 2010 collector note by a customer who worked with Rod Franklin and shop foreman Eugene Lopez says Rusty’s mother was Joyce Leddy, M.L.’s daughter, and that when Rusty retired he sold his lasts and paperwork to Robert Brest of Brest Boot and Saddle Shop in San Angelo. True West later quoted Brest as having bought Rusty Franklin Boot Co. two years before that article.

Secondary-market copy often cites Tyler Beard and Jim Arndt, The Cowboy Boot Book, pages 68–69, and names a short “cookie stitch” along the inside of the vamp next to the piping as a Leddy and Franklin tell. Treat that stitch as supporting evidence, not sole identification.