The smell of leather, glue, and polish and the sound of a quiet fan oscillating in the back of the store greet customers as they enter The Boot Doctor, the shoe repair shop of Matt Felke, a long time cowboy turned cobbler.
Felke, as it turns out, is drawn to hands-on crafts that are fading into the past. Not only does he know his leather work, he’s an experienced farrier, having shod horses with his father from an early age.
“I shoe humans by day, and shoe horses by night,” he said.
To pull this off requires skill, patience, and experience, which are hard to come by in a day and age where most school-aged kids spend their time playing video games and surfing the internet instead of working side by side with their parents, getting their hands dirty and maybe getting a scratch or two.
For people like Felke, however, there is no shortage of demand for their work.
Industrial sewing machines for specialized tasks, some dating back to the 1950s, still so similar to their modern-day counterparts that the parts to fix are still interchangeable, peek from behind the counter where Felke greets his customers. They come to him with boots and bags, shoes and saddles, needing new heels, new soles, new straps, and new linings.
They are cowboys and bull-riders, construction and office workers, retirees and young-adults. One day, he said, he had a lady bring in a pair of thick, leather overalls with tears all over it, requesting he fix the straps. He learned the overalls belonged to her son, which he used in his attack dog training profession.
Whatever walk of life they come from, he greets them, listens to them, and assesses what can be done. Along the way, he makes several friends.
Some longtime residents of Great Bend might recall when Jerry Becker opened his shoe repair shop on Williams Street in the 1970s. Later, he relocated a few blocks away, and continued in the family tradition, until five years ago, when Felke stopped in and asked a question that would change both of their lives.  Felke remembers coming to Great Bend to take his dad’s boots to Becker’s shoe repair shop back when he was a child. Over the 20-plus years he spent cowboying, he continued to bring his own boots and gear to the shop. When he stopped in to get some boots resoled, on a whim he asked Becker, “If you should ever retire, where am I going to get my boots repaired?”
Becker said his brother had a shop in Hays, or he could go to Pratt. At first, Felke wondered aloud if Becker would be willing to teach him how to fix his boots himself. Becker was agreeable. Then, Felke said, “well, if you taught me how to do that, then I’d have to have a shop.” He recalled that Becker got big eyed and said, “Well, I could do that too.” After all, sooner or later, he was going to have to quit.
As Felke tells it, he had cowboyed for a long time, been beat up, and had his left leg broken three times in the 17 years prior to that.
“I had a lot of aches and pains,” he said. “The winters were getting colder, and the ground was getting harder. In the last 30 years, I’d had several what-ifs. Some I could have scored big with, and some I am grateful for not following through on. I told my wife, ‘I’m crowding 50 years old. I’m running out of what-ifs. Worse case scenario, I flop, and go back to cowboying.’”
His wife agreed.
Becker and Felke shook hands on a deal – one price for inventory and machines, from the front of the store to the back and Becker agreed to coach and teach him for the first year and half while he learned the craft. He had some leather working knowledge, but knew nothing about working on shoes. For that, he had to start at the beginning, picking out stitches. Luckily, Becker was a patient mentor and Felke was a patient apprentice.
“I decided, in the effect that shoe repair wasn’t enough, I’d add several other things,” he said. Felke had worked on saddles for years, doing all the stitching by hand. He also built chaps, holsters and scabbards at home. He added these services to his business, and began making work chaps and more intricate, colorful bull riding chaps for the up-and-coming bull riders.
“Its just snowballed ever since,” he said. Then Becker’s brother, who also ran the shoe repair shop in Hays, retired and moved back to Denver. Within three weeks, Felke says customers from the Hays area began showing up. He’d like to hire help, but it isn’t easy to find someone with the skills needed, or someone willing to learn them.

Dying Craft
Shoe leather, heel caps, tiny nails, heavy threads and various findings fill the nooks and crannies of Felke’s work space. They tell a story of their own. Felke gets his supplies from 100-plus year old Kansas City company Konomos Distributing Inc.
Felke relates a recent conversation he had with Bill Konomos, a fourth generation owner in the company, about two more shoe repair shops in Kansas closing their doors. The nonagenarian cobbler in Winfield recently passed away, having worked till the day he died. Also, a Dodge City store where two brothers, one 88 and the other 92, retired and shut their doors. No one stepped forward in either instance to take over the businesses.
That leaves Konomos with seven shoe repair shops in KC, and one each in Topeka, Salina, Cold Water, Garden City, Colby, and Felke’s shop in Great Bend. Then he moves on to the next state. He’s seen the number of shops dwindle over the past 30 years, sometimes as many as one every week. .
“Fifty years ago there was one in every town,” Felke said. “At the very least, you’d have a post office, a gas station, shoe repair shop, grocery store--or the grocery store would have a drop off and the cobbler would come and pick them up.”
At one time, the Konomos family would load up their large truck, and great grandfather Konomos would make the rounds.
“He would pull into town and the shoe repair guy would get what he needed and then it was on to the next town,” he said. “He would leave Monday morning and come back Saturday night with an empty truck. He wouldn’t even get out of Kansas. If he was lucky, he’d get to western Kansas. At that time, there were other shoe findings companies in Kansas City, Wichita, and Garden City. Today, Konomos is the only one.
Felke blames the throwaway nature of today’s society, with so many cheap, disposable shoes, for the decline in the profession.
“You pay $10 for them and when they break, you pitch them,” he said. “A lot of that stuff I can’t fix. It wasn’t designed to be fixed. The material isn’t worthy of second set of stitches.
Back in the 40s and 50s, every little town had a shoe repair shop, Felke said. Every day, he hears from his customers thanks for keeping the shop open. He reminds them that he’s not as good as Jerry was, but he’ll do his best.
 Felke says Konomos tells him every time he comes he appreciates Felke picking up where Becker dropped off.
“There are quite a few boot makers in Oklahoma, and I suppose if you held your mouth just right, they might do a repair for you, but they’d rather sell you a new pair of $800 boots than do a $5 repair for you,” he said.

Horse shoes
On his days off, Felke also keeps alive a family business tradition that started with his grandfather.
 “My granddad was a blacksmith,” he said. He had a blacksmith shop in Hudson, where the family came from. He shod horses and was a blacksmith and machinist.
“Back in those days, kids had to help their dad,” Felke said. “My dad helped him – and dad had a knack for shoeing horses. He did a lot of the horse shoeing when he was younger, and then he married and moved off.”
As long as he can remember, his father always had a job, and in the evening hours he shod horses. Felke began helping him when he was 6 years old. At first, he started out bringing tools to his dad. It didn’t take long for him to learn what his dad needed.
“I was like a little surgical nurse – he’d hold his hand out and put a tool in it,” he said.
At the age of 10, after watching his dad trim thousands of horses, he trimmed his first horse. Trimming a horse’s hoof is a lot like cutting a human’s toenail. First, the farrier removes the shoe and cleans out the accumulated dirt from around the inside. Then, he takes the trimmer and begins cutting off about an inch thick piece all the way around the horse’s hoof. Once trimmed, he uses a file to smooth the edge and prepares it for the new shoe.
At the age of 12, Felke began shaping shoes on the anvil. His dad would tell him if the shoe needed to be heart-shaped or angled in a particular way. This cut their time on the job by a third. He would have the shoes about ready as his dad was finished trimming and ready to nail on the shoe.
 When he was 13, his dad said there wasn’t any reason why he couldn’t start nailing them on. Father and son shod their own horses, and his dad coached him until he was good enough to suit the public, Felke said.
By the time he graduated high school, he swore he was never going to shoe another horse, and he didn’t for about 11 years. He even had someone else shoe his own horses. Then, out of necessity, he found himself under his own horse again.
Felke was working on a ranch in Hotchkiss, Colo., and getting ready to go out on a cattle drive through Grand Mesa National Forest the next morning, and the farrier couldn’t make it for a week.
“It was a choice, I’d either go and have a crippled horse, or I’d shod it myself,” he said. “I shod it myself.”
A few years later, his wife’s father became ill, and the family moved back to the Great Bend area and Felke took a position at Barton County Feeders where he worked as a cowboy. The company farrier took care of all the horses, but then he quit coming. Felke and three other cowboys needed their horses shod.
“We couldn’t get anyone else to come out because they were busy, so there I was again, shodding horses,” Felke said. The other guys did his work for him while he took care of their horses, and it wasn’t long before he found himself following in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps again..
“I’ve got families that I shoe for to this day – my granddad shod horses for their granddad,” he said.

***Felke talks about shoeing barrel racers on a video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kd4ZbBRv9aA&feature=youtube_gdata***