09/08/2026
GOING WHERE NO LEATHERSMITHS HAVE GONE BEFORE
For more than a quarter century—twenty-seven years, to be more precise—I met thousands of people on weekends while doing juried art festivals throughout the United States and, on occasion, beyond.
Most of these encounters lasted only a few minutes. A person would wander into our exhibit, look at the leather goods, pick something up, ask a question, and, before long, tell me something about his or her life that I had no particular reason to know but was glad I did.
Over the years, the people I met included millionaires, billionaires, governors, vice presidents, celebrities, and the occasional perfectly ordinary person who, for three minutes, turned out to have the most interesting story of the weekend.
There was the afternoon when the F-16s came roaring overhead in tight formation. The noise was enough to make conversation unnecessary, but the woman standing in our booth smiled and told me that the first airplane in the formation was her husband.
The wallet she was buying was to be his Christmas present.
Now, there are many ways to sell a wallet, but I had never considered that the United States Air Force might provide the aerial advertising.
Then there was the woman who came into the booth looking as though she had recently lost an argument with gravity. She explained that she had just undergone hip surgery.
As we talked, she revealed that she was the shortest member of the Rockettes.
I realized, with some astonishment, that I had actually known her for decades.
Not personally, mind you. Television personally.
Every Thanksgiving, for more than a decade, we had watched her at the end of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Being the shortest Rockette, she had the honor of bringing up the rear. She was the one who, as she put it, “closed the door” on the finale. With a wink and a nod, she helped bring the television broadcast to an end.
We had watched her every year.
And now, after all those years, here she was in our booth discussing a hip replacement.
The grand machinery of life has a funny way of reducing itself to whatever happens to be bothering you on Tuesday afternoon.
And so it went.
Year after year, mile after mile, art festival after exhibition hall, we soldiered on with little regard for the effort, expense, or toll of the enterprise.
It was fun.
It was exciting.
It was occasionally exhausting in the same way that a good idea becomes exhausting after you have had it for twenty-seven years.
We traveled with what might generously be called a “devil-may-care” attitude.
We slept in KOA campgrounds, Walmart parking lots, and Bass Pro Shops parking lots. We took showers in truck stops among the trucker population, who seemed neither surprised nor particularly interested in the arrival of two traveling leather people.
For twenty-seven years, we generally made enough money to pay our expenses and enough beyond that to make the whole thing modestly profitable for the shop back home.
They got paid.
We got paid.
The shop stayed alive.
And everybody seemed reasonably content that we were gone for three months of the year.
We sold a great deal of leather goods, which meant more work for our employees back home and more employment for people who depended upon the shop.
All in all, it was a pretty good arrangement.
At least when viewed from a safe distance.
The employees back home knew about our troubles. We communicated constantly with the mother ship, reporting on storms, windstorms, sandstorms, snowstorms, flat tires, engine failures, transmission failures, and, on occasion, deaths.
The shop back home became our support vessel while we traveled across the country in the Sprinter van we affectionately called the StarShip:
“Going Where No LeatherSmiths Had Gone Before.”
We were artisans on the road, participating in juried art festivals where artists, craftsmen, and artisans became, for a few days, the public's entertainment.
There was a certain democratic quality to the whole business.
The public came.
We made things.
They looked at them.
If they liked what they saw, they gave us money.
It was an ancient economic system, but with more tents.
Of course, not every community was equally enthusiastic about our arrival.
There were the “high-class” suburbs and communities that made it abundantly clear that while artists were welcome in theory, artists sleeping in vehicles were another matter entirely.
We were sometimes encouraged to camp somewhere else.
Often, somewhere else was on the south side of town.
There were places where you were welcome until the sun went down.
After that, the neighborhood changed character rather dramatically.
In some of the larger cities, gunfire, pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers, and the general nocturnal population of humanity were not uncommon.
The people on those streets understood something about us.
We were traveling people.
We were trying to make a living.
We were, in our own way, nearly gypsies, wandering from town to town with our wares, trying to survive in a curious commercial ecosystem.
Because of this, we were often given what might be called “free passage.”
Late at night, after a long day at a festival, we would walk down streets that did not exactly inspire confidence in the human condition, looking for someplace to eat.
The pimps generally left us alone.
The prostitutes knew we weren't customers.
The drug dealers were busy with their own businesses.
Everyone, apparently, had a job to do.
And so they let us pass.
It was a strange sort of courtesy, but we came to appreciate it.
For twenty-seven years this was our life, and we never really considered it crazy.
Not until we got close to retirement.
Then, suddenly, we began looking backward and wondering what sort of people voluntarily spend twenty-seven years sleeping in parking lots and truck stops while transporting several thousand dollars' worth of leather goods across the country.
The answer, of course, was us.
We witnessed assaults.
We witnessed wild, wild abandon.
We watched parking lots fill with gangs who seemed to materialize only after we had finally managed to convince ourselves it was safe to go to sleep.
We occasionally witnessed activities of such a lascivious nature—consensual or otherwise—that we simply froze and reconsidered the wisdom of looking out the window. To timid to start up the engine flee.
It might be two o'clock in the morning.
We would hear a commotion outside.
I'd look over at my wife.
She'd look at me.
And one of us would say something like:
“I think they might miss Sunday School tomorrow morning.”
Then we would hunker down in our little RV while humanity stumbled past, sometimes apparently unable to locate the portable toilets that had been provided for precisely this purpose.
It was not glamorous.
But it was adventurous.
And there is a difference.
The following morning, as reliably as sunrise, civilization returned.
The sun came up.
The streets became respectable.
People emerged carrying coffee.
Families arrived. In a University town the mother arrives with her freshman daughter for first visit, she has no concept of what this parking lot is like when the sun goes down.
Dear Reader let me straggle back on topic;
Customers appeared.
Artists and artisans opened their booths and went back to the ancient business of making something with their hands and persuading another human being that it was worth buying.
The same communities that had seemed somewhat apocalyptic at two in the morning were perfectly civilized by ten.
Only people who continually travel the country trying to make a living at art festivals could fully understand this transformation.
We saw it again and again.
And again.
We never really viewed those nights through the eyes of desperation.
It was simply our lifestyle.
It was the way we made our living.
It was also the way we came to know the public.
And what a public it was.
People willing to stop, look, talk, tell a story, and sometimes compensate a craftsman for having spent his life learning how to make something with his hands.
That was the bargain.
We made things.
They bought them.
And along the way, they gave us their stories.
A pilot's wife buying a Christmas present.
A Rockettes dancer recovering from hip surgery.
Millionaires and governors.
Truckers and prostitutes.
Artists and customers.
Pimps and drug dealers.
People sleeping in parking lots.
People flying F-16s overhead.
People who watched the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade every year and people who probably never watched it at all.
For twenty-seven years, we crossed the country inside a Sprinter van called the StarShip, dragging our little corner of the leather business behind us.
We endured storms, breakdowns, bad roads, bad neighborhoods, good festivals, terrible festivals, and enough parking lots to qualify for some sort of honorary zoning classification.
We made a living.
We employed people.
We met thousands of strangers.
And, every once in a while, a stranger would tell us something that made us realize that, in one fashion or another, we had been acquainted for years.
Looking back now, I suppose we could have chosen an easier life.
We could have stayed home.
We could have slept in our own bed.
We could have avoided truck-stop showers, questionable parking lots, snowstorms, sandstorms, transmission failures, and the occasional two-o'clock-in-the-morning theological discussion concerning the likelihood of someone making it to Sunday School.
But then we would have missed the people.
And the people were the whole thing.
So, upon reflection, would we change anything?
No.
Not a thing.
It was an odd life.
A strenuous life at times.
A somewhat profitable life, mostly.
A ridiculous life, occasionally.
But it was ours.
And for twenty-seven years, we were out there—
Going Where No LeatherSmiths Had Gone Before.
Billkeitel.com/buffalo billfold company
