This Austin vintage cowboy boots hunter keeps Texas history alive with hundreds of finds

When Bruce Springsteen played Austin earlier this year, he shopped Full Circle Vintage's tables of old cowboy boots on South Congress Avenue. "You're still finding these?" he asked boot savant Joey Medina.

The "these" in question are hundreds of pairs of vintage cowboy boots, as old as the 40s, that Medina collects and sells at his stores in Austin and Lockhart, plus weekend pop ups. His Lockhart archive includes long rows of boots — there's a lime green pair, gold ones, white ones, black ones with red roses, brown pairs with yellow stars and turquoise shapes, a Ronald McDonald red and yellow set and a handful of robin's egg blue offerings.

The store is like a well-curated museum, and that's no mistake. Texas history is stitched in these boots and Medina is taking the time to make sure it endures.

Medina is the owner of and boot-finder for Full Circle Vintage, a shop he started as a pop-up when he moved to Austin about 12 years ago. But boots were, as they are for lots of Texans, an obsession that started early for Medina.

"It all goes back to nostalgia. When I see a pair of boots, it makes me feel a certain way," he said.

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Medina grew up in Houston on a ranch that's been in his family for over a century, and it was there in the 80s that he remembers seeing one of his first pair of cowboy boots. The boots belonged to his grandfather and were a black cherry pair from the 60s with a pointy toe, white stitching and a white shaft.

"He was a working cowboy, so they were definitely distressed and weathered and nicely broken in," Medina said. "They were pretty badass."

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Home grown

Medina got his first pair of boots, a right of passage for any Texan, when he was 2. He's become a bootin', scootin' encyclopedia for cowboy boots since. Pick a boot, any boot, at his Lockhart store and he can rattle off who made it and what decade he believes it's from. (We're sure he can do this at his Austin location, but we just visited the Lockhart store.) Medina talks about Texan boot designers as if he had posters of them in his teenage bedroom.

Names like Charlie Dunn, Willie Lusk, M.L. Leddy and Ray Jones spill out of Medina's mouth at every chance he gets. In Lockhart, Medina pointed out a tan pair of boots with turquoise and silver embellishments.

"Those are Kolton Ross Roberts. He made boots for Dolly Parton," Medina said.

The Texas of it all is important to Medina. The majority of his collection are boots that were made in Texas, a fact he mentions first thing. So many big names in boots started in Texas — Lucchese in San Antonio, Tony Llama in El Paso and Justin's in Fort Worth.

"I'm really proud to be from Texas. We're in the mecca, we're in the cowboy boot capital of the world. Growing up around it, I didn't realize it. But now that I'm really up to my neck in boots, yeah, we're the cowboy boot capital of the world. Always have been," Medina said.

Deliberate finds

The boots Medina sells are found all over the U.S., in places like Florida, Tennessee, New Mexico and, obviously, Texas. He digs in junk warehouses and sleuths in small towns to find his prizeworthy collection. His finds usually happen through word-of-mouth.

Medina recently went to West Texas not knowing anyone or where to start. He shopped around, found a nice pair of boots in a store and asked an employee about them. She referred him to a man in town who collected boots.

"So, I went to this old man's house and he had stuff all over, I mean, all over his house that he had collected. He had a bunch of M.L. Leddy boots and they were just collecting dust," Medina said.

He was able to buy a lot of boots from that collector. But sometimes, wheeling and dealing can be tough. On another recent antiquing trip (we won't say where because these are Medina's hard-earned spots), negotiations had stalled between Medina and a collector. The collector wouldn't budge on the price, so Medina offered up a coin toss.

"So we did that and I won the coin toss. I was able to get the boots and hats for a better price than what he was offering and I do that pretty often," Medina said.

Once he finds the boots he wants, they are cleaned up and repairs may be needed before they're put out to sell. The whole process is slow, but that's the point. Full Circle Vintage isn't about fast fashion. His boots can range in price from $200 and up, depending on the particular boot. Vintage is preferred because craftmanship and construction was way better back in the day, Medina explained. Everything now is made with plastic or can be found on Amazon and won't last as long as the real thing.

The boots you pick out at Medina's shop may have been made more than 50 years ago, which is a resounding endorsement for their quality. Buying vintage also prolongs the story the boots tell.

The boots tell a story

Medina tends to, and rightfully so, wax poetic about cowboy boots.

"With western wear, it tells a story, you know what I mean? An old pair of boots from the 1940s or 50s, imagine if they could speak to us? Imagine the stories they could tell us," Medina said. "How many hands have these boots been through? How many horses? How many trails?"

Story after story lines the boot wall at Full Circle Vintage. The fashion tells a story, too. Medina's boots aren't just brown or just black or just anything. They've all got a little magic, whether that's sweeping designs of flowers, stars or the phrase "ride 'em cowboy," or just a neutral black pair with funky stitching.

In the 1950s with Gene Autry and John Wayne, Medina explained, cowboy boots were bright and loud and colorful.

"It was glamorous," he said.

Color faded out in the 60s, and earth tones dominated in the 1970s before colors got loud and bright again in the 80s.

"The bright inlays and different colors, it makes me feel a certain way. I'm glad other people like it, but even if they didn't and they thought I was crazy, I would still curate and have a wall full of bright boots because I like it," Medina said.

The other nice thing about boots is that they're for everyone. Anybody can wear boots and for any reason. You don't have to be an actual cowboy working on a ranch, you could just want something to elevate an outfit or something to make you feel good.

"Boots can make you feel kind of important. There's something about them. It's the noise they make when you walk through a building with a wood floors. It's the look they put off, the silhouette," Medina said. "It makes me feel so good. It's nostalgia, especially when I'm wearing vintage because it's like, 'Who wore these boots before me? What did they go through?'"

Boots don't fall into one category and at Medina's Austin store, neither the clothing nor the boots are curated to men or women specifically.

"Sometimes dudes will come in and say, 'Where's the men's section?' Depending on the guy, they might feel uncomfortable about shopping where things are curated together. But with boots, think about this, it's the same type of footwear and people don't feel weird about. Isn't that interesting?" Medina said.

The way boots can make a person feel also has no limit.

"Like you said, you feel more feminine when you wear boots. It makes me feel more masculine. But it's the same type of footwear. That's interesting how that works," Medina said.

On the Friday afternoon we visited Full Circle Vintage in Lockhart, Jan Bessette came into the store looking for her first pair of cowboy boots in 31 years. She didn't want too high of a heel and was a little nervous because she hadn't worn boots in a long time.

Medina took just a moment and then selected a dark brown pair from the 1970s for her to try first. Bessette, who couldnt be more than 5-foot-5, sat on a cowhide covered stool and slid one of her feet into the boots.

"Wow! Wow!" she said, with a big smile stretched across her face.

Bessette ended up taking two pairs of boots home. Boots are for everyone, and on that day, these particular ones were for her.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Full Circle Vintage keeps Texas history alive via old cowboy boots