Cowboy hats by the hundreds adorn the walls

It was sometime back in the late 1980s that Stewart Martin, owner of Ben's Western Wear on Front Street, hung the first beat-up old cowboy hat in a place of honor, high up on the wall among the pale trophy buck mounts. No one now recalls which hat was first, but it proved to be a good idea. Customers would remark on the cowboy who had worn that hat, the horses he had ridden and the work he had done. And other hats soon followed. "Stewart was real proud of the hats. His theory was that everyone's hat was important to them. His goal was to write a story every month about a person whose hat was hanging on the wall, but he passed away in November of 2006," said his widow Jill, who runs the store. And now there are more than 400 hats on the walls, mostly battered Stetsons and Resistols, each with a name tag, and another 100 hats are waiting in storage for lack of space. If all their stories were told, it would make a nice history of this part of South Texas. A lengthy poem on that theme, written by Dan Cadden hangs on display. Hats bearing the names of George Strait, Rick Perry and Nolan Ryan are on the wall above the Jockey underwear display. And Dolph Briscoe's cracked old straw lid is right above the Carhartt work jackets. And while a few other names are recognizable to anyone who spent a few years roaming South Texas, most of the hats belonged to ordinary working men known only to their families, friends and fellow cowpokes...more