Hutzell: Carol’s Western Wear returns for one final Maryland cowboy roundup

Cindy Chance isn’t sure about letting the belt buckle go.

It’s a little tarnished but still a two-handed memory of her father, Bob Chance. He was Maryland’s champion seller of all things cowboy fashion — 10-gallon hats, caiman-covered boots, bolo ties and snap-button shirts.

Carol’s Western Wear was the place to outfit yourself for a square dance or riding the beltway range in your suburban pickup truck. The last of its four stores across Maryland closed after a 60-year run in 2019, and Bob died three years later.

Now Cindy is saddling up for a final roundup, an auction of dozens of items left over from a famous run.

“I’m beginning to have less attachment to the individual items, and where my heart really gets kind of filled up is thinking about the entirety of it — the whole of it,” she said.

The Annapolis woman sold her father’s house and 11 acres in Pasadena. It’s where her brother lived, too, until he died of cancer a few years before their father’s death.

All she has left to do is get the barns in order, straighten the hats, put out the autographed pictures and paintings and line up the boots and saddles for auction on Sunday.

“When I sit in my brother’s favorite spot in front of the hay barn and look out over the property, it’s the memories — not the individual items anymore.”

Cindy’s father got into western wear in the 1950s, when the family was living in Glen Burnie and attending square dance socials.

Her mother, Carol, made her own outfits: circle skirts, crinoline petticoats and peasant blouses. Friends urged her to sell them, and the business was born.

Western wear followed, and when the first store opened in 1962, it was Carol’s Western Wear, even though it was always Bob’s business.

“He was a born entrepreneur,” Cindy said. “He had his first business card when he was 13.”

There were flush and lean years, times when plaids and Tony Lamas were all the rage or stuck in the back of a million closets.

“Western wear was a whole lot of fun,” Cindy said. “Every seven or eight years, a new trend would happen — hippies wanted fringe jackets, then line dancing got huge, then rock and rollers wanted snap-front shirts again.”

She worked with her dad for years. And the cowboy shop in a state where cowboys aren’t a native species attracted cowboy-culture celebrities.

George Strait, the country western baritone who made “All My Exes Live in Texas” a late-1980s earworm, dropped by to sign a hat. It’s still in the box.

Garth Brooks, whose deep-chested “Friends in Low Places” was the sound of country in the 1990s, signed a rain jacket you could wear while roundin’ up herds of little doggies on the back 40.

Even Chuck Connors, an archetype of the 1950s television cowboy stars with “The Rifleman,” couldn’t resist Carol’s. He came and signed photos while seated on a rail fence outside the house.

Times change for everyone. Carol and Bob divorced, and both remarried. The stores shrank from four to one, the final outpost holding out in Glen Burnie.

Cindy moved on as well, earning a graduate degree in cultural anthropology from the University of Maryland and taking a job at the National Park Service.

“In the class where they teach you how to do ethnography … my project was, ‘Why do men in Maryland buy boots?’” she said. ”Our customer base was about a third white, a third Spanish-speaking and a third Black, and I interviewed them about what boots meant to them.”

It’s about power. It’s about sexuality. It’s about family traditions.

For a cowgirl from Glen Burnie, there’s no small irony in where the job took her. She helped incorporate tribal history into the Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail.

“It should be, really, called the Indigenous Chesapeake National Historic Trail, because that’s where the story is,” Cindy said.

The legacy of Carol’s lives on in more boxes of hats, piles of buckles and a few shelves of old boots.

Months after the Glen Burnie shop closed, former employee Aracely Lira De La Hoya opened her own store in Pasadena, The Cowboy Western Apparel and Cowboy Boot Retail.

Some of the customers followed, but she’s developed her own clientele among teenagers dressing for country concerts and the Mexican immigrant community.

“The Mexican culture has always kind of worn boots and stuff,” said Valleria Valles, De La Hoya’s daughter. ”So, they are a good majority of our customers now."

Her family bought the Chance homestead, pastures and trails off Baltimore and Annapolis Boulevard that seem perfect for a morning ride. They plan to build a new home there.

It comes with a stable and barns, though no horses at the moment. Well, except one.

It’s a rearing fiberglass palomino, recently pulled out of a back stall for the auction. It will go to the highest bidder.

The “Carol’s Western Wear” buckle — so big even the tallest cowpoke couldn’t wear it — maybe not.

Sitting at the kitchen table in her father’s house, Cindy looked it over. She wasn’t sure if she should hang on to it a while longer.

“It’s not the things,” she said. “It’s the memories of this place that matter now.”