The Many Hats of Shorty Koger

Article by Heide Brandes on Cowboys & Indians – The premier magazine of the west | Read the full article by clicking here

Shorty Koger is a woman who's hard to miss. Walking into her office at Shorty's Caboy Hattery in the heart of Oklahoma City's dusty and historic Stockyards City district, Shorty walks with the confidence of a woman who, despite the jeering of men all her life, has carved a niche in the Western world out of sheer stubbornness.

Bedecked in a pinstriped gold and white striped shirt tucked neatly into a starched dark pair of jeans, Shorty sports a cowboy hat of her own creation — a bone-colored jaunty thing accented with dark brown buck-stitching along the brim and the hatband.

Around her waist, a shiny massive belt buckle proclaims "Art of the Cowgirl/Master Hatter Shorty Koger." It sparkles when Shorty walks in, as stout and strong as the horses she grew up riding and competing on. She strides to her desk and points to the massive stuffed beaver that poses like some hairy dragon on the shelf near the wall.

"A customer sent that to me but didn't tell me. I came into the store and found this huge box, and I thought it was a bunch of hats that needed to be renovated and cleaned," Shorty says in her low scrub-brush voice. "I opened it up and I saw that fur, and it scared me to death."

Beaver is important in Shorty's world. It's used, sometimes in blend with rabbit, in all of her handmade-in-America custom hat creations. And that attention to materials, consistency, and detail has made Shorty one of the few hatters known globally for creating the truly custom pieces. In the back of the store, cast-iron machines that were top-of-the-line back in the 1920s and during the Great Depression are still used to steam, shape, and smooth the beaver felt that are destined to become Shorty's signature hats. A small army of polite women and men work the machines with nimble hands before using their own elbow grease to sand down the felt and shape the crown.

For Shorty, making and restoring cowboy hats in the traditional and hand-hewn way is a lost art. For a woman to create a hat empire in a traditionally masculine world of cowboys and Western heritage is near unheard-of. For more than 30 years, however, this gray-haired, dry-humored woman has done just that, turning an obsession with cowboy culture into an art form that attracts fans from as far as Israel, Australia, Italy, and Asia.

"When I went into business, there were maybe six hatmakers in the whole United States," Shorty says. "I was the only woman who started a hat-making business by myself."

Shorty's hats, as well as her support of Western culture and history in Oklahoma and beyond, earned her a place in the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame in 2021, an accolade that Shorty says is the biggest honor of her life.

Born in 1945 in Oklahoma City, Shorty, given name "Lavonna," spent most of her youth in the tiny community of Fairfax in Oklahoma's northeastern Osage County. Amid the sprawling hills of giant cattle ranches, Shorty's family traveled once a week into town for groceries and supplies.

"Mom and Dad would go into Fairfax to buy groceries, and I always remembered these three cowboys who were actors. They were Randolph Scott, Ben Johnson, and an actor whose name I can't remember," Shorty says. "I was about 5 at the time, and I saw them out in front of the movie theater. I couldn't do anything but stare at them because they had one real colorful cowboy shirts and boots, and their hats were really cool shaped. I thought to myself, Man I'd love to be a cowboy."

When Shorty told her mother she wanted to be a cowboy, her mother told her she was a girl, and girls didn't get to be cowboys.

"I said, "Well, I'm still gonna be a cowboy," Shorty says, leaning back in her chair behind her desk with the attitude of someone used to not particularly caring what others thing. She smiles mischievously, the giant gold National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame medallion around her neck catching the light, and it's easy to picture her as a stubborn little cowgirl stamping her foot at the unfair idea that girls can't be cowboys.

"I didn't know how to do any of this stuff — it just was trial and error, like everything I've done in my life just about," she says. "When I was in high school, I had a really good horse that won competitions just about everywhere I went. That was the year I thought I was gonna make it to the National Finals Rodeo here in Oklahoma City."

Although Shorty worked the rodeo circuit, earning a name for herself as a fearless rider and for her never-say-die spirit, she struggled to find a career that would fulfill her cowboy dreams. She ran a Western store for a while, helped a friend start a Subway sandwich shop, and ponied horses up the starting line at the horse races at the Oklahoma State Fairgrounds raceway.

"Honestly, I was obsessed with cowboy culture," Shorty says. "My love was always with the Western lifestyle."

After Shorty's father died in the 1970s, her brother sent off two of her father's cowboy hats to be renovated and cleaned. "When my brother got those hats back and they were ruined, he told me 'As much as you love rodeos, you ought to get in the hat-cleaning business.' It was like a bolt of lightning. I said, 'Holy cow. What a great idea!"

Getting into the hat-cleaning wasn't as simple as it sounded, but it was serendipitous. One day in the 1980s, a friend of Shorty's invited her to come with her to pick up a custom hat made by an Oklahoma City artist who worked out of his house.

"I went back over there in a day or two, and said, 'I would love to learn how to do this.' He said he had his business up for sale but already had a buyer. I said, 'Well, let me ask you this: IF the buyer doesn't show up, would you sell it to me?' And he said, 'Oh, absolutely!'"

The original buyer never showed up. Shorty managed to scrape together $20,000 from family members and through loans to buy the business and the original equipment. She put that money in the man's hand, and suddenly she was in the hat business.

Like everything else in her life, Shorty learned the art of hat renovation and creation by trial and error. She nearly blew up Stockyards City using an old steam barrel that had a gas leak. She passed out from the caustic cleaning solutions used to clean the felt hats and she burned herself on irons and steam too many times to count.

Article by Heide Brandes on Cowboys & Indians – The premier magazine of the west | Read the full article by clicking here