Founder
Bob Storey (Storey family)The Town That Made America’s Glove
Before there was a Nokona, there was Nocona — a small north Texas city that had spent four decades becoming one of the most concentrated leather-manufacturing towns in the American Southwest. H.J. Justin had relocated his Spanish Fort boot shop to Nocona in 1889 when the railroad arrived, building a mail-order empire that reached thirty-six states and five countries by 1915. When Justin’s sons moved the company to Fort Worth in 1925, his daughter Enid stayed behind and founded the Nocona Boot Company as a deliberate act of local loyalty. By 1926, Nocona possessed tannery infrastructure, skilled leather craftspeople, and a commercial culture built around the economics of specialty leather goods.
Into this environment — leather expertise, railroad infrastructure, oil-boom capital — the Storey family launched what would become the Nokona Glove Company. The company began in 1926 as the Nocona Leather Goods Company, founded by Cadmus “Cad” McCall and T.B. Wilkes. The original product line was wallets, purses, and belts — the commodity leather accessories that Nocona’s manufacturing base was already equipped to produce at scale.
The pivot that defined the company came from Bob Storey, a Storey family member who had played baseball at Rice University and the University of Texas. His insight was simple: a baseball glove is a precision leather article requiring exactly the skills Nocona’s workers already possessed — pattern cutting, hand stitching, shaping to form, and finishing for durability. The product demanded leather quality that mass manufacturers could not replicate at low cost, which meant there was a defensible market position for a craftsman producer.
The corporate identity transition required navigating an obstacle that produced the brand’s most distinctive feature. When the company sought to trademark “Nocona” for its baseball gloves, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office declined: existing trademark law did not permit a company to incorporate a town’s name directly into a product mark. The solution was elegant: substitute the “c” for a “k.” “Nokona” was trademarked in 1934, and the brand’s signature spelling became permanent. The homophone relationship between “Nokona” and “Nocona” was obvious to any customer who looked at a Texas return address — the brand traded on its place of origin while complying with trademark requirements.
What Makes a Nokona Glove Different?
The short answer is: American hands, American leather, and eighty years of accumulated craft knowledge in a single factory in north Texas.
The longer answer begins with material. Nokona’s signature innovation came in 1957, when the company introduced the first baseball glove manufactured with kangaroo leather, becoming the first company to use kangaroo hide in glove production. The choice was technically driven. Kangaroo hide is lighter than cowhide at equivalent thickness, has a higher tensile strength per unit of weight than virtually any comparable animal hide, and is naturally resistant to moisture absorption. For a baseball glove, these characteristics translate directly to a lighter-feeling glove with superior durability — qualities that players at every level immediately recognized.
The full Nokona product line spans multiple models: fielding gloves, catcher’s mitts, and first-base mitts, with leather options including American steer hide, top-grain cowhide, and the signature kangaroo leather the company pioneered in 1957. Each glove is assembled by hand at the Nocona facility, with skilled workers performing the cutting, stitching, and forming operations that define the product’s quality.
But what ultimately separates a Nokona glove from every other glove in a sporting goods store is a fact that can be stated plainly: it was made in the United States. When Rawlings, Wilson, Spalding, and MacGregor moved production offshore in the 1970s and 1980s, following an economic logic that was hard to argue with, Nokona stayed in Nocona. The company’s production remained in Texas, with American workers, using American or carefully sourced premium leather. “Made in Nocona, Texas” is not a marketing phrase — it is a description of manufacturing reality that no overseas-sourced brand can honestly claim.
How Did Nokona Survive When All Others Left?
The answer involves a wartime transformation, a third-generation leader who turned tradition into strategy, and a catastrophic fire that the company refused to let kill it.
The WWII Contract That Changed Everything (1942–1945)
The defining chapter of Nokona’s early history began with World War II. In 1942, the company received a U.S. government military contract to produce baseball gloves for American servicemen stationed worldwide. The scale of the wartime demand was unlike anything the small Nocona shop had faced before.
Before the contract, the operation produced approximately 50 to 100 gloves per day — a craft-shop pace appropriate to a specialty manufacturer with regional distribution. Under the military contract, production scaled to 1,000 gloves per day, a tenfold increase that required significant workforce expansion, floor-space reorganization, and supply chain acceleration. This was no incremental adjustment; it was the transformation of a small leather shop into a genuine wartime production facility.
The military contract’s practical benefits extended beyond revenue. Wartime production relationships with the federal government gave Nokona a credibility and scale of operation that smaller specialty manufacturers rarely achieve. The company emerged from the war years with an expanded workforce, a proven capacity for high-volume production, and a record of having contributed materially to the war effort — a form of institutional prestige that carried real commercial weight in the postwar consumer market.
The Postwar Baseball Boom (1945–1980s)
After the war, Nokona returned its production capacity to baseball gloves and entered one of the sport’s great expansion eras. The postwar baseball boom was real and sustained: returning veterans brought renewed enthusiasm for the game, Little League grew dramatically through the 1950s, and suburban America’s embrace of youth sports created a mass market for baseball equipment that had not existed in the 1930s. Nokona was positioned to compete.
The company’s 1957 kangaroo-leather innovation gave it genuine product differentiation at a time when the American glove market was beginning its long consolidation. Through the 1960s and 1970s, the major American sporting goods companies were under increasing pressure to reduce costs, and Asian manufacturing offered a solution. Japan, Korea, and Taiwan built robust sporting goods industries that could produce serviceable baseball gloves at a fraction of American labor costs. Brand after brand shifted production offshore.
Nokona did not follow. The decision carried a real cost — Nokona gloves were more expensive than offshore alternatives, constraining market share in the mass consumer segment. But it also created a brand identity that proved increasingly valuable as the decades passed. In a market segment defined by players who cared about craft — serious amateurs, collegiate athletes, minor leaguers, and major league players who wanted a glove with a story — “Made in Nocona, Texas” carried genuine weight. MLB players who used Nokona gloves during this era provided on-field endorsement that no marketing budget could easily replicate.
Third-Generation Leadership: Rob Storey and the Made-in-America Brand (1992–Present)
In 1992, Rob Storey — a third-generation member of the founding family — assumed leadership of Nokona. The transition represented more than a generational handoff; it was the moment when Nokona’s commitment to domestic manufacturing became an explicit strategic identity rather than simply an inherited practice.
By the 1990s, the landscape had shifted dramatically. Rawlings had moved virtually all production overseas. Wilson followed. The mass market for baseball gloves was dominated by Asian-manufactured product. In this context, Nokona’s 100-percent domestic manufacturing was not merely a tradition — it was a competitive differentiator of the first order. Rob Storey oversaw a period of brand investment that leveraged this distinction. The company’s marketing communicated the story behind the glove: the Nocona factory, the American workers, the generational expertise, the same Texas town that had been making leather goods for over a century.
The 2006 Fire: A Town Doesn’t Let Its Manufacturer Die
On July 18, 2006, the Nokona factory burned to the ground. The fire destroyed the eighty-year-old production facility, with losses exceeding $5,000,000. For a company of Nokona’s scale, this was potentially existential: the specialized equipment, the accumulated tooling, the production floor that workers knew by habit and instinct — all of it gone overnight.
The company’s response became one of the defining stories of its institutional character. Nokona resumed production within ten days of the fire. No employee lost wages during the recovery period. The company relocated temporarily to the Old Nocona Boot Factory — the former Enid Justin facility, empty since Justin Industries had consolidated operations after its 1981 acquisition — before eventually moving to a new production location off Clay Street.
In a town of three thousand people, the difference between a manufacturer that holds through a crisis and one that uses the crisis as an exit opportunity is a difference residents understand viscerally. The fire and its aftermath also illustrate the physical continuity of Nocona’s leather-manufacturing ecosystem: that the Old Nocona Boot Factory could serve as Nokona’s emergency production space reflects how deeply the town’s industrial identity is woven into its built environment.
Cultural and Economic Significance
Nokona’s significance to Nocona and Montague County operates on multiple levels.
Economic: In a town of three thousand, the distinction between a manufacturer that stays and one that leaves is enormous. Every job in the Nocona factory represents purchasing power circulating in the local economy, and every year Nokona continues production in Nocona is a year the town retains an employer that could, in purely economic terms, have moved offshore decades ago.
Heritage: The Tales ‘N’ Trails Museum in Nocona, which opened in 2010 after fifteen years of community fundraising, includes exhibits on Nocona’s leather-manufacturing heritage encompassing both the boot industry and the glove company. The museum’s five thematic pillars — Native American heritage, Western heritage, oil and gas, leather industry, and agriculture — frame Nokona as part of the leather-industry strand of the town’s story, alongside the Justin and Nocona Boot companies.
Baseball: The Nokona brand also connects Nocona to baseball in a way that resonates beyond manufacturing. The town has other baseball connections: Charlie Robertson, who grew up in Nocona, pitched one of the seventeen perfect games in major league history on April 30, 1922. That Nokona gloves and Robertson’s perfect game both trace to the same small north Texas town is the kind of historical convergence that gives a community a story worth telling.
National Identity: Perhaps most importantly, Nokona functions as a live demonstration of what American-made manufacturing can still look like. The company’s continued domestic manufacturing is a source of civic pride that connects the present town to its founding logic — that Nocona, sitting at the convergence of railroad infrastructure, leather expertise, and entrepreneurial ambition, could make things that people across America would want. In an era when that founding logic has largely been disproved for small American manufacturing towns, Nokona’s persistence is not merely sentimental; it is a working rebuttal to the economic forces that hollowed out similar communities.
The Naming Architecture: Nokona, Nocona, and the Leather Legacy
One persistent source of confusion in regional history involves four distinct entities sharing the same phonetic identity: the town of Nocona, Texas; the Nocona Boot Company (Enid Justin’s 1925 enterprise, acquired by Justin Industries in 1981); the Nokona Glove Company (the Storey family’s 1934-branded operation); and Justin Boots (the original Justin family enterprise, based in Fort Worth since 1925).
The glove company’s “Nokona” spelling is not an arbitrary variant — it is a deliberate legal workaround, trademarked in 1934 because federal trademark law would not permit a town’s name as a product trademark. The boot company spelled its name “Nocona” because it was named after the town as a corporate entity, not as a product trademark, which was permissible under the law. The 1981 acquisition of the Nocona Boot Company by Justin Industries did not affect the Nokona Glove Company, which has remained a separate, independent Storey-family enterprise throughout its history. The two companies share a town, share a leather legacy, and share a phonetically identical name in their respective proper spellings — but they are legally and operationally distinct.
Nearly a Century of American Manufacturing
Nokona has been producing gloves in Nocona, Texas, for nearly one hundred years. The company navigated the Great Depression, converted to wartime production in 1942, introduced a landmark product innovation in 1957, resisted competitive pressure from overseas manufacturing through the 1970s and 1980s, transitioned to third-generation leadership in 1992, survived a factory-destroying fire in 2006, and continued producing gloves through the 2020s.
The company’s identity as America’s last handmade baseball glove manufacturer is not a nostalgia claim; it is an accurate description of market reality. When the other historic American brands moved production offshore, they followed an economic logic that was difficult to argue with. Nokona chose a different logic — one grounded in craft identity, place-of-origin branding, and a willingness to accept a higher cost structure in exchange for a product story that no offshore manufacturer could replicate.
That story is a Montague County story. The leather ecosystem that made Nocona a viable manufacturing location, the skilled workforce that developed across generations of boot and glove making, the civic culture of a small town that rallied to rebuild after a catastrophic fire — all of it contributed to making Nokona possible and keeping it going. Learn more about the heritage businesses of Montague County.
Sources
- Nokona Manufacturing Company, “Our Story” (nokona.com)
- TSHA Handbook of Texas, “Nocona, Texas” and “Nocona Boot Company” (tshaonline.org)
- Nocona Economic Development Corporation, “Western Heritage” (nocona.org)
- Wichita Falls Arts and Culture, “Tales ‘N’ Trails Museum” (wichitafallsarts.org)
- Baseball Almanac, “Charlie Robertson” (baseball-almanac.com)