Randy Becker will tell you he’s not a shoe repairman. He’ll say it without any edge, just matter-of-factly, the way he says most things. “I fix boots,” he’ll say. “Mostly western boots. Some pack boots. A saddle here and there.” He’s been doing it out of his small shop on Sheridan Avenue for going on twenty-two years, and if you walk past without looking for the sign, you’ll miss him entirely.
The shop is spare. A wooden counter, a few shelves of leather conditioner and laces, a backroom where the machines live. There are boots lined up along the floor waiting their turn — some cracked and dull, a few with soles hanging half-off like they’ve already given up. Randy hasn’t given up on any of them. He runs his thumb along a split seam the way a doctor presses a bruise, finding exactly where the problem starts.
He learned the trade from his uncle in Thermopolis, spent a few years in Billings doing general leather work, then came to Cody because his wife grew up here and because, as he puts it, “the boots are different in Cody.” He means that people here actually wear them. Ranch hands bring in ropers that have seen five hundred hours of hard ground. Outfitters drop off mule tack in October when the season ends. A few tourists wander in having blown out a heel on the Wapiti road, looking sheepish and grateful.
What Randy does isn’t exotic. He resoling a good boot rather than letting you replace it. He’ll resew a welt, recondition a dry shaft, replace a worn-down walking heel. On a basic resole — a new unit sole and heel — you’re looking at somewhere between sixty and ninety dollars depending on the boot, which is about a quarter of what a new pair of comparable boots would run you. For a full recraft, count on more, and count on waiting a week or two. He doesn’t rush, and he’s told people that plainly enough that most of them have stopped expecting him to.
He takes quiet pride in a few things. He uses leather soles when that’s what the boot was built for. He doesn’t talk you into work you don’t need. If a boot is too far gone, he’ll say so — which is a harder thing to do than it sounds, because people get attached. He had a woman come in last spring with a pair of Lucheses her grandmother had worn. The uppers were cracked through, the welt was shot, the lining had dissolved. He spent twenty minutes with her looking at them before he told her the truth. She thanked him anyway.
The shop keeps regular hours, Monday through Friday, roughly nine to five, though Randy’s been known to flip the sign and stay late if he’s in the middle of something. There’s no website. The phone number is in the local directory, and word of mouth has done the rest for two decades.
If you’ve got a good pair of boots that are starting to go — and in Cody, nearly everyone does — this is the place to bring them. Randy Becker will look them over, tell you what they need, and get it done right. That’s the whole pitch, and it’s enough.
