A 92-year-old leather goods company in Nocona, Texas has a new facility for the only Made in the USA baseball gloves in America. Torin Halsey
The company might have gotten an auspicious start 92 years ago, but Nokona American Ballgloves is still stitching together an American manufacturing success story.
A local banker, Cab McCall, loaned money to a leather goods business in 1926. The business skipped town and forfeited the assets.
McCall invested new money into the operation and began making billfolds and purses as Nocona Leather Goods Co.
The Great Depression caused a shift from wallets to manufacturing baseball gloves and, in 1934, Nocona Athletic Goods Co. was formed.
Robert E. Storey reportedly said, "During the Depression, if you were selling a billfold for a dollar, it better have a dollar bill inside it."
Over the years, the company also made baseball bats, catcher's equipment, football helmets and sports accessories. It now focuses solely on handcrafted baseball gloves.
The Nokona name for the baseball glove was born from a trademark discrepancy, which was solved by changing the "c" to a "k".
The company grew and over time, the town became known across the country for high-quality leather goods manufacturing, including the Nocona Boot factory.
Nocona Athletic Goods was dealt a setback in 2006 when a huge fire burned their facility to the ground.
The family-owned company rallied and salvaged what equipment it could and was able to resume production in less than two months.
As technology has advanced, so has the design of baseball gloves. Nokona offers 45 different models of gloves with 25 different web designs.
Nokona also offers consumers a chance to custom-design their own glove from the company's website with a variety of styles and colors to create something exclusive.
Rob Storey, great-grandson to Cab McCall, has overseen the recent move from an inefficient older building to a brand new facility built in part of the historic Nocona Boots building on U.S. Highway 82.
The boot company moved production to El Paso in 1999.
Storey helped design the more efficient layout of the production floor and chose high-efficiency HVAC systems, all LED lighting and installed skylights, which have helped reduced electrical consumption by about 40 percent.
The public is invited to a grand opening Thursday evening from 6:30 to 9 p.m. at 917 East Highway 82 in Nocona.
The new location also has retail space and a museum that chronicles the company history.
"My grandfather, during the '60s, made a major manufacturing decision for our business to not import," Storey said. "That caused a number of difficulties through the years.
"But now, here in 2018, we're the only company in the United States that manufactures ball gloves in the United States. We're not the biggest, but we like to think we're the best."