Sam's company was owned by several men after his death by heart attack in 1953, beginning with his nephew Dace Myres who had been active in the company from early days.
Unlike my blog posts about Heiser's catalogue dating, which you can take as gospel because so much triangulating data was used to formulate the dates, the Myres catalogues shown here are 'very likely' but not absolute. Don't go trying to win any bar bets with this info: Myres only occasionally dated its catalogues, moved within El Paso only once, and repeated most pages year-by-year.
In 1919 the Sweetwater operation burned down, by which year Sam also had burned down his marriage by taking a young mistress who was also a heroin addict (read: expensive piece of ass). Insurance paid out handsomely and he shifted to El Paso in 1920.
Below, as with the Heiser blog post these images are not clickable; but with them one can match a cover or a page one has to the year, and note when a model such as the various Jordans, was introduced:
He died in 1953 and his nephew Dace took over:
Dace Myres died in 1964 and Sam's son Bill entered into an arrangement with saddler Harlan Webb to operated the business, beginning that year.
Webb stuck with it for a decade despite not liking El Paso and in 1974 sold it to retired cavalry Col. James Spurrier, who was wealthy by being of Osage descent (oil, that is, black gold, texas tea) and intended to use the company as a base for polo equipment. There are no catalogues or even identifiable gunleather for the Spurrier era.
Col. Spurrier announced plans to close in 1976 but instead sold to a former employee of Myres who was Frank LaCroix. Frank operated the company in El Paso only until 1977 when he sold the name to one man who moved the brand back East, and the other assets such as machinery and tooling to Bobby McNellis who created today's El Paso Saddlery with them (unrelated in any way to the original EPS).
After LaCroix's ownership there were no further Myres catalogues. Frank sold the name on to one David Duclos who trained up at today's El Paso Saddlery but returned back East. Duclos had narcolepsy and is unlikely to be living today; the Myres name is used today by Mike Barranti from a TX township called Dunn that is a half hour NW of Sweetwater. All three of the famous Myres stamps are in a private collection.
To read more about it all in my book titled "Holstory -- Gunleather of the Twentieth Century
-- the Second Edition", click on the new link at top of page.
Yorumlar