Forty-one years, one bell, and a lot of boots

The bell above the door came with the building. My daddy bought this store off a man named Earl Sackett in 1983, and the bell was already twenty years old then. Every soul who's walked into Witfield's in Comfort, Texas since has walked in under that same bell.

I was seven when Daddy took over. I grew up doing homework on a stool behind the register. I learned to measure a foot before I learned long division — same metal Brannock device the whole time, cold against a kid's sock in August, because the AC unit is older than I am.

I could tell you a hundred stories, but I keep coming back to one. A kid named Ray Villarreal came in years ago needing his first pair of real work boots, seventeen years old, counting quarters out of a coffee can. I fixed him up, told him pay me when he could. He came back three weeks later, paid in full, and he's bought every pair of boots he's owned since — including the ones he wore to bury his own father, and the ones his own son wore in here last spring for his first pair. That's the whole business, right there. Not the shoes. That.

This store has been the first stop for prom shoes, work boots, and church shoes for three generations of this town. We've measured the feet of kids who grew up, moved away, and came back with kids of their own to measure. That's not something you build with a marketing plan. It's something you build one Tuesday afternoon at a time, for forty-one years, one customer walking in under the same bell.

The world doesn't leave much room anymore for a store like this one. But I don't know many men who can say their life's work had a bell on the door that rang for forty-one straight years, for a whole town's worth of first boots and last goodbyes. I got that. I'm grateful for every ring of it.

If you're one of the people who walked in under that bell — as a kid, as a parent, as somebody just passing through Comfort once — thank you. This store was never really mine. It was always something we kept together.