A Surviving Saddle Maker Tells His Story
St. Louis Glove-Democrat Sunday Magazine, June 28, 1931
Page 2
There is just a trace of that feeling too, in the old gentleman's son, John, pilot of the concern's present destinies. But first of all, John is a business man. When he saw that saddles, bridles and harness were on the verge of becoming candidates for the museum shelf alongside the bustle, the Leghorn hat and the first radio set, he began scouting another commodity to which he might turn his manufacturing machines. What ever new item he decided to make would naturally have to be of leather; the family had known all about leather for generations.
Design and Beauty of Saddles Described
The president of this company, showing a person through his display room, will point pridefully towards natty looking bags for which golfers will pay up to $125 each at stores from New York to Frisco. But it was in the direction of a small display in the rear of the room that his feet inevitably led.
Here was a layout of saddles. English riding seats, range saddles, high-backed saddles with a touch of Spanish design, Kentucky spring saddles. They were of good leather, good workmanship. Hotze stood in the midst of them and talked design and beauty. When he had spoken of his golf bags he talked quality and price.
He likes making golf bags because it is good business. It is, in fact, 90 per cent of his business; and his product is handled by the best sports stores in the country. But he likes better to make saddles, because well, for the same reason an old stager loves his footlights, and old sailor his ships.
Another person possibly would not see any great satisfaction in turning out leather poultices for the backs of nags so that the riding breeches of thousands might not be jostled off equine vertebrae. But that same other person likely will boast of his ability to overhaul a motor or sell 10,000 gross of shaving soap a year. It is all in the point of view. John Hotze knows saddles, has been making them all his life. They were his justification for the daily bread.
"My father" said President Hotze, "was of Northern persuasion during the civil war and it became uncomfortable for him in Memphis, where he had been established. In fact, it became positively hot. So he pulled up stakes and boarded a steamer for St. Louis. He left my mother and family down there with a barrel of sugar to gain passage up when he found a job and lodgings. The money in those days, as you know, wasn't worth the paper it was written on. I had not yet been born.