“He even dyed his camping tent black,” adds Debra.Ī mid-‘80s Santa Fe vacation inspired the sweet, slow siren yodel that drew the Beards back to the West. During the New England era, Tyler/Barry fastidiously refused to wear leather in any form and required his salon employees to follow that fashion rule. Thin, pale and just a tiny bit goth, he dyed his all-cotton clothing-including his cotton shoes-jet black. In Portsmouth, Tyler-then still known as Barry-owned a hair salon and the historic, several-story building that housed it. Sister Debra and cousin David recently helped fill in some of the “lost years” of New England exile. And back in the day, Teresa Skelton, the groovy gal he married, was a sweetheart in my own rodeo.Īs happens with folks, I lost touch with “T and T” in the 1970s when they moved to Paris, New York, and finally, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and didn’t see them again until 2002 when Tyler organized a reunion of the old gang in Dallas. Tyler-known then as Barry Beard-played drums in a band that provided music for a 1970-production of one of my plays. His sister Debra was my square dance partner in elementary school. Tyler was part of the music and art crowd I ran with while coming of age in North Central Texas in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. With that endorsement, I must fess up in full disclosure mode. ![]() I see them displayed, not only in bookstores, but also in museum gift shops, bootmakers’ workshops and Western wear stores. Then they printed more and it just kept selling.” All of Tyler’s books remain in print. The first printing of The Cowboy Boot Book sold out in a month. “Apparently,” adds Jim, “there were a lot of people out there who really wanted a book on cowboy boots. ![]() Arndt also handled the images for Tyler’s 1993 opus on the history of sagebrush fashionistas, 100 Years of Western Wear. “He called those peewee boots ‘the boots that started it all,’” explains photographer Jim Arndt, who shot all the beautiful botas in Tyler’s three books on vaquero footwear, including the title that says it all, Cowboy Boots (2004). The evidence is right there in black and white on the jacket flap of his 1992 volume, The Cowboy Boot Book, in a photo of little Tyler in his cowboy outfit with his “red, white and turquoise boots and fancy spotted holsters.” Cousin David Slack adds that Tyler was seldom without his fancy boots and cowboy hat at the age of five or six. “He loved those little boots, but that may have been one of his whoppers,” chuckles Tyler’s big sister, Debra Conkling, gently relishing her brother’s deployment of a Texan’s birthright to stretch the blanket or redecorate the facts. “As a child,” wrote the late Tyler Beard in his 1999 book, Art of the Boot, “I had to be coaxed out of my Roy Rogers boots nightly.” The Reinventions of Tyler Beard By Gene Fowler
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