 host and the producer of the chats, which are a program of the Leather Archives and Museum Works in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. How are you today? I am well. Thank you for hosting us here at Leatherworks. Pleasure to have you. So tell us a little bit about business. How's it going post pandemic or middle pandemic? Well with the with the exception of things like the Red Hankey social and the bondage club and the social events we do here, things are going quite well this year. In of course 2020 was a disaster and mid-year 2021 things picked up and we had a great year and 2022 is off to a good start even though we didn't get to go to Mid-Atlantic Leather. Well there's always next year, we'll hope. Let's go all the way back. Tell us a little bit about where you're from, a little bit about your family, your background? Well I was born in northeast Ohio and I was raised there and here in Orlando and in upstate New York. I moved to Florida after a breakup with a boyfriend and something like that. I came down for season. Okay. It was October when we broke up and I came to Florida for season and season is over because I'm still here. I haven't gone away. Actually attended Divinity School, tell us a little bit about that. Yes. I attended Divinity School for two and a half years. I withdrew with my partner at the time. This was in the early 90s, late 80s actually when HIV was new and there were no medications for it and my partner got sick and I could not take care of him, work and keep up to school. So that's the long and the short of Divinity School. I still recognize the importance of community in our lives and that's how I tend to see religion as a group of stories that help us guide our lives and help us create a community that we participate in and I've just changed communities. Okay. That's a very sort of progressive point of view on that I think. How does that fit in with whatever you were taught in school? It depends on where you go to school. Okay. And my original degree is in philosophy and my thing through school was what was called at the time narrative theology, how stories inform our lives and it's the cultural canon that we belong to. The stories, the art that create our life, the people we associate with and that's how I see the leather community is it's a series. We have a problem in the leather community in the last decade with our cultural canon breaking down. When I was a young one, every Leatherman I know read Drummer Magazine the day it came out and if you didn't subscribe you knew which day of the month it would show up at your local newsstand and you were there to get it and there were at the time there was Bear Magazine and American Bear Magazine International Leatherman a couple more and we all read those from cover to cover. So we saw the same stories, we saw the same art and it created our cultural canon but in the 2020s there's not much left of anything to cement the cultural canon. That's a very strong statement. What do you think we're lacking? We're lacking source of communal stories. We don't all read the same stories. We don't all read the same, we don't all see the same art. So that part of the cultural canon is very open to interpretation and without a base that is uniform it's really hard to develop a cultural canon. How do you feel that we achieve given the circumstances today? Not a clue. Leatherworks tries to do some of that with our educational programs but you know it's just not the same as being one of a hundred thousand men reading the same articles every month and seeing the same cartoons and the same fresh drawings from The Hun or the same fresh drawings from Etienne or Thomas Finland although we didn't see many fresh Thomas Finlands in my day but we saw Thomas Finlands. We occasionally see them today. It's just not the same. Let's build on that a little bit because in the community we so often hear about the lack of enthusiasm and the lack of growth and the lack of support for a lot of institutions, the bars, the groups. Do you think that these two are enjoying? Absolutely. Without a firm basis that everyone agrees on it's hard to create a community and so our community it's not one community but many communities that are fragmented you know we have a community called Recon and a community called Growler, community called Scruff but at one time there were four leather bars functioning in Fort Lauderdale at the same time. At one time there were five or six leather shops in Fort Lauderdale at the same time. Today there's one leather shop and well maybe two a leather shop and a small bar store and two bars and if it weren't for tourists we wouldn't have much we wouldn't be able to support two bars. Yeah we see that all over the Adobe. Yes absolutely. I mean there's a desire for for guys to get together. I mean Mid-Atlantic Leather and IML and Folsom Street Fair and Up Your Alley. Those are all with us every day or most years and they're an opportunity for guys to get together and swap stories and DNA and it's the it's the swapping of DNA that's the reason to get together and while we're doing that we got to tell stories and tell lies to each other and we see the same art at those events. We see the same clothing so we those provide the little bit of cultural stability we have. Now I can't help but wonder here at Leatherworks you must see a very wide breadth of people that come through. Do you feel that there is a strong sense of fellowship there or do you feel it's rather disjointed like you maybe depicted a moment ago? Oh I think I think it's it's it's very disjointed. We have a fair number of tourists that come through and so they're just blips and then we have the locals but that local community involves people from people in their 80s to people in their 20s and the 20-year-old the 20-somethings and the 80-somethings don't have a lot in common. There's a few there's a few of the young ones who like the older men a few of the older men who like the young ones but you know there's not a lot there and you know we used to have five or six leather clubs in town that were reasonably active and today we have a puppy club it's not very active we have a boys club that's not very active and we have a traditional leather club that's not very active so there's not a lot of energy I mean the way I saw it one of the one of the things that made the leather clubs function was the desire to get together with like-minded individuals and an excuse to travel together and go meet fresh meat well in a community like Fort Lauderdale the fresh meat arrives at the airport seven days a week all year long most the biggest share is in the winter time but you know it's fresh meat all year long so do you feel that that is what is keeping the vibe going here without that do you feel it would sort of evaporate it would be much smaller it would be much smaller without without the tourist influx and the fact that there is a community here stimulates tourism I mean guys choose to come to Fort Lauderdale leather leather folk choose to come to Fort Lauderdale because there's a leather community here and there's a couple guest houses that cater to leather folk and there are two two bars and a whole bunch of restaurants it's a great community I hear people speak very well of the community here and especially of a lot of the groups that you host here a lot of events that you'll host here but what I'm also hearing is that you're depicting something that's a little disjointed so what have you to say to people that speak so well it just got through saying it's a wonderful community okay okay it is a wonderful community if I think back to the early 70s I went to to college in a small town and we had a gay bar about 35 or 40 miles away and that one gay bar was the only the only thing in 100 miles and so everybody went there the young guys the old guys the the the drag queens the leather folk the lipstick lesbians and the what at the time we called the bull dykes we all frequented the same place because it was a small town and we had no choice and Fort Lauderdale is a big town and there's a lot of choice and so it's and since there's the opportunity to hang with like-minded individuals people hang with like-minded individuals you know there was a joke from my days in the clergy you have one Baptist you have a Christian you have two Baptists you have a church and you have three Baptists and you have a schism you know with when a community gets big enough just to divide into smaller functional groups they do because we can't maintain intimate relationships with a hundred people we can't maintain intimate relationships with 50 and even in a group of 20 or 25 people there will be subgroups so we're because you can't you can't hang and have intimate relationships with a large number of people it doesn't work let's take a step back tell us a little bit about your coming out and what circumstances you faced at that time uh I was lucky I was in Rochester New York which at the time in the early 70s was a great place we had I think five bars and two bath houses and the five bars illustrate what I was talking about in the community that divides up because there was a bar for the older crowd and there was a leather bar and there was a disco bar and there was a neighborhood bar um and a piano bar and so the community divided up into the the places that were comfortable for that yes um and you know I left there to go to college and in college we had one bar I just described a few minutes ago yes so it just illustrates the point that I'm talking about that we find a comfortable place for us how did you discover King Leather oh I think 1963 Cowboys and Indians and subjugating and tying up and it it never really changed it kind of calmed down for a few years as I moved into early adolescence but by the time I was in my uh by the time I was 20 I was back at it again so depict the scene a little bit for us at that time I depicted the scene in a small town where everybody hung together and we were pretty closeted outside of that one place um and in Rochester where I grew up again it was moderately closeted it was private but Kodak was a big employer at the time and was very open to they had a lot of gay people working there and they were called Kota queers and um and Xerox was a big employer that brought people in from all over um and it was a rapidly growing community and it was a it was a comfortable place um to be discreetly gay as it were um I came out of the summer after my senior year before I went to college came out to my family um and you know as with many my father um my parents were separated and in the process of divorce at the time and my father wanted me to come home at night uh so if I had a trick he wanted me to bring the trick home so he knew where I was uh whereas my mother didn't want to have much of anything to do with it she didn't want to know about my boyfriend she didn't want to hear about it she didn't want to meet them participate nothing um and it was there were 30 years where my mother and I seldom spoke um whereas my father and I just remained close all the way through up until his death and about about 15 years ago my brother managed to get my mother and I to reconcile um and we became fairly close in her final years um and I was able to uh spend a lot of time with her in the last couple years of her life she had she had dementia um was painful at times she didn't always know who I was it was interesting there was a boy in our household she always knew his name she didn't know my partner christian's name she didn't always know who I was um but she always knew math's name it's rather interesting the clouds they're so difficult to understand that was a very progressive point of view for your father how did that happen I think my father um was fairly he went to he went to church as a kid and that love died neighbor kind of stuff kind of rubbed off on him um he was very progressive when it came to education um he knew that the secret to um a lot of the civil strife in our society was education um and was always supporting education for everyone he grew up in an integrated school in an integrated neighborhood in the 40s so he was fairly progressive in his later in his retirement years he was he worked with uh abused children wow he volunteered with abuse with abused children and was a guardian at light of in the courts here in florida so I mean my my public service uh community stuff comes to me naturally and came from my father my mother was very bigoted but she knew she shouldn't be very narrow minded in many many ways very very uh traditional but she knew it was wrong how interesting and so she oh while she had all kinds of racial and ethnic uh bigotry she tried not to teach it to her children because she knew what was wrong that's very progressive for that generation yeah yeah a lot changed for you though at one point you had some health issues in your 30s tell us about that well I mentioned my partner who got sick while I was in divinity school um after he died I did not take big care of myself I didn't know what to do and so I worked and I didn't eat well and I was working 18 hours a day and commuting for an hour a day and living on five hours asleep four hours asleep um and it was a recipe for disaster and my cooking worked I had a heart attack at 36 and I went to the doctor the day of the heart attack because something wasn't right and because I was 36 the idea of being a heart attack just didn't enter anybody's mind my gosh um I couldn't see my regular doctor that day I had to go to urgent care totally missed it and about three months later I started having angina and I went to my medical doctor and he wanted to call an ambulance and call me to the hospital right then and there and it turned out it wasn't serious as it were um when we got to the point of doing the angioplasty and all that stuff the artery that was blocked was too small to even put a balloon into at that time but it was enough to create some symptoms and so with medication and diet and over the years I managed to to control it I've had a couple of stents since then so my heart isn't the best thing in the world but it doesn't cause me it doesn't cause me a lot of problems I have health issues but they're all under control I started my morning this morning with a 30 minute bike ride I go to the gym three days a week I ride my bicycle almost every single day we had a couple of days in the 40s here last week I heard I couldn't bring myself to ride my bicycle in the 40s that was a couple of days I missed but other than that most days a lot changed for you though with that you went different directions what did you do that's when I finally um dealt with the loss of my partner interesting story I'm full of stories um my my partner had been what was his name Todd okay Todd Todd Todd had been dead a little bit over a year he died just before Thanksgiving and a year later I went to Mid-Atlantic Leather I couldn't afford it I stayed with a friend who lived near near Dupont Circle um and um and you know after Todd died I knew that I would be single the rest of my life because no one would have ever loved me the way Todd did and you know and I was old and I was overweight I was a fat old man no one was ever gonna love me again um then I went to Mid-Atlantic Leather um there was a lot of evidence that I was wrong about being a fat old man and no one would ever love the guy I was staying with the newsprint picture drawing on the refrigerator of a pig and he started putting hash marks on it oh boy um and when I and I didn't even really notice because I was rather busy um and when I went to leave on Monday he gave it to me and I was kind of dense and then he pointed out the hash marks and I said yep you got them all I left his house to go to this Dupont Circle subway station once and never made it to the subway station um that was back when the Leather Act was on Connecticut Avenue between his house and Dupont's Circle subway station and I stopped in the Leather Act and what I went shopping for and what I took home were two different things oh my goodness um and so I was very busy that weekend and I went home with this tangible proof that I was wrong but I was not a fat old man that no one would ever love again and over the next uh couple of years I was able to really process that and understand and I was single for about five or six years but I turned my I got to understand myself and unlearned some things that I had learned and taught myself and became quite proud and out about being um a Leatherman why did they did Leather why did you go there it was close and my friend lived nearby so I could stay with him for free how did you learn about it remember everyone read the same magazines and the same stories and there was the Leather Journal that had the calendar and drummer that had the stories we had this cultural canon and Mid-Atlantic Leather was a piece of the cultural canon got it then and now what happened after that that's about when the Bearman started as a business after a couple years after that first trip to Mid-Atlantic Leather the Bearman started as a business and then I was an itinerant leather vendor selling bear stuff and leather and went to runs all over the east coast and set up my little traveling store for the weekend and then I moved to Florida and had the opportunity to be a partner in the Leather shop at the Ramrod we did that and realized that hey wow this is successful but we're a hundred percent dependent on the bar and we need stability so we found this building that we're in today and we rented it and after a year and a half in this building I realized that this was going to be successful too and I went to the landlord and offered him the lease was still active and I offered him a significant increase in the rent in order for a longer lease and it worked out well and eventually I tried to buy it and tried buy the building you wouldn't sell so we moved out of here around the corner on to and to just a little store on the next street over and he called me back about 18 months later and said you still want to buy that building it had been nothing but an albatross for him and we bought the building and did some renovations and have slowly grown into it and grown out of it now we've had to move our production into another another building about a block away and our office is in the building next door so but let's take a step back because when we prepared for this interview you told me a little bit more about your your traveling shop it was very fascinating how did you do that because you had like a special little van oh yeah well it wasn't a special van it was a it was a christ wimpy man okay um no it was a Plymouth it was back when there was still Plymouth's it was Plymouth Voyager and um so I would fill it up and plan a trip of visiting two or three towns and two or three different weekends of consecutive weekends in the same neighborhood by the same neighborhood within four or five hundred miles of each other and during the week between events I would stay with friends made friends with benefits maybe yes and um and I would sell my wares to little gay retail stores but what prompted you to do this to to go on the road and do this well I couldn't afford to go to these leather events and so I decided to turn them into bustmen's holidays so I set created this little business so I could go to an event and sell stuff and make enough money to pay for me to go to the events got it um I didn't make a very good living at it but the business slowly grew and I developed inventory and connections and then when the opportunity to settle down into a a retail space at the ramrod bar I was all over it what sort of products did you develop oh you know the standard kind of stuff you know I figured out how to make a ball stretcher and I figured out vests and harnesses for years and years um we never had completed harnesses I just had boxes of parts and someone would walk in the store or or the traveling store and I would say well you know we could make a harness for you and you reach in the box of parts and get leather straps and some hardware and boom boom boom you made a custom harness for that person and it was only after I quit working in the store all the time myself that we started making stock harnesses to put on the wall we just you know red assembled pieces so so so our harnesses were sort of like model team forwards you know you just grab the pieces off the shelf assembly line assembly line you know assembly line the pieces and then assembled them for the for the particular person and at that time we made a checkbook cover that had a little leather leather embroidered leather flag in it and one that had a rainbow flag in it of course a couple years ago I still had some left and finally ended up giving them away because who has a checkbook anymore sure you know we made a little bar wallet that uh held a driver's license and a credit card or an ATM card and a couple of dollars those were popular you know and then the the the connections for things like like lube and maybe maybe some little brown bottles it takes a while to find these connections and we did it we got there how did people respond to the products you had what sold what didn't sell what did you learn from what they wanted well the biggest thing I learned about merchandise was guys love t-shirts and leather guys love black t-shirts and they like suggestive t-shirts they don't like shirts that are too graphic they want shirts with a double entendre or just a suggestion that somebody in the know would recognize one of my one of my favorite shirts for years is michael schrunder schrunder schroder schrunder something like that um an artist his artist name was daddy dade with him oh uh and it was a big bear peri bear guy walking a bear on a leash um that was really really popular um because if you were in the know you knew it uh and if you weren't it's just an interesting image on a shirt a guy walking a bear on a leash but a shirt with a a shirt with a cock on it not so much um and that shirt with the bear on it we did it with black ink on a white shirt and white ink on a black shirt and the white ink on a black shirt sold probably five to one wow um guys and in fact just the other day in 1993 is when the bear man started and I know that because I just found a box of t-shirts I made in 1993 um that had my bear man logo on it and the date 1993 another thing I learned about t-shirts don't do it huh and that I printed that shirt in white and in black um the white shirts I still had a bunch of wow and the black ones not a one left and I kept I kept some of the white ones and I gave the rest of them away the more my uh and I kept a couple of my size and gave the rest of them all away recently um and it's kind of fun wearing a a um a shirt and from 1993 it had upside down pink triangle on it oh you haven't seen an upside down pink triangle in a decade or two that was so replaced by the rainbow yeah yeah so it's interesting the changes but still today here at Leatherworks we sell very very few white colored t-shirts we sell black t-shirts for how long were you traveling around doing this I did that for two years oh okay okay like I said long enough to get to know people all over the country and meet people at events so that I could put them in my uh Rolodex and and uh contact them when I was going to be traveling in in their part of the world for a free place to stay okay um and that reminds me of another story okay at at the time I had an answering machine hooked up to the hardwired phone at my house I didn't have a cell phone um and this is the story of just how small the leather community was I was living in Durham North Carolina at the time and I was going camping with the burgundy field bears at hillside campground that weekend and on the way I needed to go to Pisaic New Jersey for some business bright idea Thursday night I will drive to Washington and go to the eagle and see if I can't find a free place to spend the night okay Friday morning I would get up go to Pisaic do my business and then drive to hillside spend the weekend with the bears which I did uh I found a place to spend the night that wasn't free and it was a death boy and so I'm in the dc eagle on a Thursday night and if you've ever been to the dc eagle on a Thursday night back in 94 93 something like that uh you knew that there was nobody there and there was nobody there I knew anyway when I get home from my weekend with burgundy field bears there's a message on my machine from someone in in the anapolis that I knew asking me about the death boy that I picked up at the dc eagle on Thursday night and I was in the dc eagle no more than 45 minutes and there was not a soul there I knew that's how small the community is at that time wow wow you've mentioned the shop at the uh the ramrod here tell us a lot more about that because I think that that's definitive for the whole story here oh well the the store is 132 square feet um and the the guy who owned it and opened it when the bar first started um headaches and again this was pre protease inhibitors um and he got to where he wasn't able to work the store at all and he wasn't much able to make stuff at home uh to be sold at the store and he let the guys at the bar know that he needed to give it up and my business partner Eric Lawrence it's a whole other set of stories there um they offered it to him and he said sure if I can get bare man to be my partner so I got home from one of those three week road trips and my message machine at home was full it was about seven or eight messages from people trying to get me to contact Eric Lawrence right away because there was an opportunity to buy the store at the ramrod bar okay okay um and I got home on a Tuesday I think Friday night Eric and I opened the store wow we bought we bought the store lock stock a barrel whatever was there we bought and of course I had to merchandise in my van um and we threw away probably a quarter of what was in the store that we bought because it was shop worn it had been in the ramrod bar so it was covered in nicotine and smoke and and we we took over no idea what we were doing but well I had a little bit of an idea and Eric had a little bit of an idea but really didn't know what we were doing um and the interesting thing is the cash register in that store was the cash register that Eric had 10 years earlier when he owned a hair salon and he sold it to somebody else and it had moved over to the uh for Butterdale Eagle and the store that Ed Byarski had and when Ed went out of business that store and that cash register ended up at the ramrod store and we got it wow small bro yes again another story of how small the world is um and Eric worked part-time and he had a Rolodex he had the best Rolodex of anybody I knew in Fort Lauderdale okay um and this again this was still pre-sale phone here and um it's so so far long ago that we had a rotary dial telephone wow in the store that we used to call in and get authorizations for credit cards oh my we didn't have a credit card machine that's how old it was wow and that's how frugal I am because I had the rotary dial dial telephone we got a credit card machine quite promptly um but still you'd have to call in for authorizations every once around we had a rotary dial phone got Eric hated that thing he hated that thing and I loved it because it was paid for yeah yeah so um we did that for like I said a couple of years um and we realized that we needed a daytime store so we'd have some stability and Eric never worked full time in the business he always worked part-time he tended to work he'd work weekends and maybe a couple of hours on a busy night he was a hairdresser during the day and and then we opened we got the store open and I worked I worked for the store full-time Eric would help out and he knew everybody in town when needed to do something he knew who to call in that era when he was in good health there were he's sponsored a lot a lot of events he started the leather mask ball with his partner I was Smith and the black heart ball he did a lot of things for the community he knew everybody to call and then the store just kind of whenever there was a big event like that of course the store would benefit and the store was the sponsor for all these events and then Eric you know about 10 year 10 12 years ago now started getting sick he had he was a long-term survivor of HIV and he died of cancer so and not one that's related to HIV it was just totally different weird kind of cancer that he was told at the time it's a good thing we got it when we did otherwise you'd have been dead within a year because this is a terrible cancer and he lived he lived eight years with it they didn't get it all but every year or so when the medication they had for it stopped working a new one would come along wow and so he lived about he lived with the cancer about eight years and slowly backed away from the store so that brings you now to your current circumstances and you said it's already outgrown part of the building where you've had to move the production to another location you also told me that one of the specialties of shopping here is superior customer service talk with us about that early on I guess I guess it's been long enough now Jojo Hughes had a leather shop on Legion Alley right around the corner from the dugout and Jojo was all what did some wholesale business not huge wholesale business but did some wholesale business and the first piece of leather I ever bought was wristband that I bought from the little leather kiosk store in the Rochester in the Rochester Ramrod no what was it called wasn't the Ramrod I don't know the leather it was Rochester Rams was the leather club in the back no I can't remember the yeah it wasn't actually it was the leather bar in town and they had a little at one time had a little leather counter there and I bought this wristband that was made by Jojo Hughes's company okay and it was made of it was had some studs on it and it was made out of bonded leather um and about a year later I had to replace it because the leather had started to disintegrate and the snaps were state were steel not stainless steel and they'd all rusted and I said when we started in business I don't ever want people to remember me because I remembered this was a decade later maybe more I don't want people to remember me or my merchandise the way I remember this piece that came from Jojo Hughes I'm not going to be the for the price conscious consumer I'm going to put up quality and it's all about customer service because you know face it you can buy lube at Walmart you can buy lube at Walgreens well here in Fort Waterdale you probably can find somebody Walgreens to help you pick the right lube but you know anywhere else in the country chances are slim you'll get customer service at Walmart buy and lube or at Walgreens buy and lube and you definitely won't get it at Walmart but here at Leatherworks you've got somebody who's trying to know the difference between the different kinds of lube and it can help you find the right lube and we've always um prided ourselves on quality products and customer service and when you have a quality product you don't have to worry near as much about customer service with people bringing something back and saying this is a piece of crap or it's broken or it's damaged or whatever that's one of the reasons very very very early in our business career I found out about stainless steel snaps because in a bar store with all the smoke in the nicotine the snaps would get nasty and gray and corroded very very quickly and so we discovered stainless steel I found stainless steel and we switched over and at the time of stainless steels a set of four parts that make a snap was about 10 cents in stainless steel and about two cents in plain steel well it's a whole lot more today but the the spread is still about the same these switched very quickly the merchandise we bought had steel snaps and I realized how quickly they were failing in that in that environment so we switched to stainless steel and solid brass and brass with chrome plating good quality chrome plate and then your customer service is finding them making sure that the customer gets the right size conference my god we sell hundreds of different conference well you got to get the right size and you know and this conference for wearing to the to the new beach and conference for wearing to the non-new beach and conference for wearing to the bar and conference for wearing all day and conference for sex and people don't realize this you know somebody comes in the background well what do you want it for and a lot of customers kind of shy about that so do you want to go into the beach or for everyday wear or for sex because we got different conference and that's what we're all about the other I don't work in the store very much the other that these days but the other day they got real busy in the store and I happened to be there and I waited on a customer who is from Indiana or someplace I don't know not here he was going on one of the cruises that was leaving that weekend and we we visited and he finally says well you know we're here about we come to Fort Lauderdale on vacation about once a year and we always shop here and the reason but the reason we shop here is the customer service and that just makes me feel good and I don't want to give away a business secret but I'm going to she charge you for this everybody who watches this youtube video needs to pay for her we don't sell stuff here but it works you might walk out of here with a bag that has stuff in it but we didn't sell this stuff we sold the service it's not about getting a cockering it's about getting the right cockering it's not about getting a harness it's about getting the right harness for you that looks good on you that fits you we don't offer our vests for sale online intentionally because I want people to come into the store and I want them to be fit for a vest because I want it to fit right and I want it to look good on them and if we have to say you know your body shape is a little bit outside the the norm and we need to custom make your vest uh if you want a good if you really want a good vest that fits you well we should custom make it it's going to cost a little more you know the best you've got on is is about as good as you're going to get for off the rack but we can do better and leave it up to the customer but most people don't know what size they wear right and you know but the hell is small and medium or large or extra large how do you know what that is even you don't you guess so it's all about the service when you are wanting to hire someone when you're looking for a new staff members for the store what qualities do you see honesty and integrity personality and we start most of our people part-time if they work out well if they do a good job they take good care of customers if we get good feedback from them or about them then then they can move the full time we don't start everybody at part-time but we start a lot of people at part-time the general manager of the store started working part-time two nights a week at the ramrod about 10 years ago and he now it's general manager around here and he helps out with stompers boots he helps out not a lot but a little bit and he helps out with stompers gloves a bit more as well as training people and filling in for the bookkeeper if the bookkeeper is out he does jack of all his jack of all trades and he started here part-time two nights a week okay do you have much of a turnover in personal oh it's the great recession it's the great resignation we go prior to the recession we would which we lose one or two a year very very stable and then in 2020 we had to let some people go and cut hours for the rest of them or most of the rest of the staff and since then we have a far more turnover than I would like as we had tried to ramp back up for business I've never experienced the number of people who a long ago we had somebody go to lunch and never come back oh yes yesterday I had somebody working in the guy who was running our sewing shop um came in and I was busy with another project it didn't even notice he was here at first because I was so preoccupied with what I was doing and then I realized he was here we finished up the other project and he walked over and he threw his keys on the counter in front of me and said I quit it's been great goodbye my gosh okay and tried to find out what that was all about he wouldn't even talk and we had we had a couple of guys last week week before one was out sick for a week and he came in and there was some problems while he was out and we just talked to him he quit one of his good friends that worked with us had been out the same time he never came back so we just have a lot we've had a lot more turnover we go through this from time to time when you have turnover sometimes you go through a couple of people before you get stabilized I remember we're a drug free workplace now and it was probably five or six years ago we had five new hires in a row with crystal meth issues and that's when we I for years said what people do on their own time is their own top is their own stuff but the reality is what you do on your own time comes to work with you every day and so we instituted we do we do drug testing of all new hires and we do occasional random testing and we do testing when we have reasonable reasonable cause okay and most of the time when we have reasonable cause other people don't even take the test they just say I can't pass it and they're gone wow and aren't our health or our workers comp insurance company gives us a five percent discount on our premium because we're a drug free workplace that's a state of Florida program wow wow so I hate crystal part of the leather archives at museum what was your involvement Joseph B from his years at um Drummer magazine and American leather man he was the executive director of the archives at the time that they found the new building and Tony de Blas had been very much involved with the founding of the leather archives along with Joanne Gattie and Bill Costumeris had been a bit involved he was from North Carolina part of the Tar Heels and ran the southeast leather contest or something um and anyway we were at we were at IML and I was went to build Bill Costumeris and Tony was sharing the hotel room and I went to their room one night after the vendor market closed it out came the bourbon and the conversation about uh we just located a building that was going to be perfect for the leather archives and somehow they needed to come up with money for a down payment yes and my uh there had been enough bourbon at that point in time that I my mouth read a check that I had the cash uh I said I'll give you 1500 dollars which I had no idea where that money was coming from um towards this down payment and you go around the vendor market tomorrow and you talk to every vendor and say bare man has pledged 1500 towards this down payment um and it turned out they managed to get eight or ten people to play match my pledge um and that night at the contest um my my hangover was gone by then uh and uh they started talking about this new building and they drugged the the ten of us out on the stage that had pledged money and that's when they passed the hat um and that's how I started my involvement with leather archives and then the next year michael horowitz from new york um was on the border with archives and he came up to me in the vendor market and said congratulations and I said for what well you've been elected to the board of the leather archives oh I didn't know a thing about this um and that's how lucy goosey the leather archives was at that time before they when they had a little storefront on clark street and a bunch of stuff in chuck's basement um and I said okay we had our first board meeting um and I said you know we really have to have an institution here and I was involved for nearly 20 years with the leather archives um and spent about eight or those eight or ten of those years as the treasurer and helped create the institution um the framework for an institution so that no one ever got told oh congratulations um that people were vetted before they were elected to the board and talked to so and I'm quite proud of what happened with the leather archives we in that 20 years I was involved we went from chuck who paid most of the bills out of his own pocket um to um a freestanding institution why did you hate so I you know we when we bought stompers gloves um all of a sudden I had my hands really really full and I'd been on the board for blind sheriff 20 years and it was just I couldn't give it the attention it deserved and I had managed to recruit a good people to the board um and knew the the archives would be in good hands without me what's the biggest misconception about you I don't know I don't know if there are any um depends on who you talk to you will find people who will say that I'm a real bench and you'll find people who'll say I'm a great businessman and you'll find people say that I'm a son of a bitch and they're all right okay they're all right um so I don't know that there are any misconceptions because there are times when I can be a real challenge and there's times when I'm a great guy but don't screw with me for an amazing interview for inside another history a fireside channel thank you thank you