The sound of pounding hammers and children giggling rang at the Old West Museum during Cheyenne Frontier Days — a symphony to Cheyenne’s leatherman, Rob Underwood, there to demonstrate an old-world skill to a brand-new generation.
You won’t find Underwood advertised on billboards or signs. He works strictly by word of mouth.
Yet he’s as busy as he wants to be.
The people who need him find him, whether they just want to save a family heirloom or their favorite purse.
“I’ve done 26 purses so far this year,” Underwood said with a chuckle. “That’s a bread-and-butter item.”
From Hobbyist To Heirloom Saver
A military veteran, Underwood has long made a hobby of fixing leather items.
“I was working part-time at the local Tandy Leather, and there were so many people who would come in and say, ‘The strap broke off my purse. Can you guys fix it?’,” he said.
Saying “no” to a broken purse wasn’t the worst thing. But the ones who came in holding a piece of history — that was different.
“It was the people who would say, ‘This is the wallet my grandfather carried in Vietnam. Can you fix it?’” he said.
Those were the stories that got to him.
“So, I left Tandy in 2017 and opened up Rocking RA Leatherworks specifically because I wanted to be able to fix things,” he said. “To me, leather is something you should be able to give to your grandchildren.”
One of his first big projects was repairing three leather aprons for Freemasons.
“They brought it to me and said, ‘Is there any way to restore this?’” Underwood said. “And I said, ‘Absolutely.’”
All it took was a little knowledge, a little TLC, and a lot of patience — the main ingredient in all successful leatherwork.
That restoration turned out well enough that the aprons were displayed at a museum in Baltimore.
The sound of pounding hammers and children giggling rang at the Old West Museum during Cheyenne Frontier Days — a symphony to Cheyenne’s leatherman, Rob Underwood, there to demonstrate an old-world skill to a brand-new generation. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily) 
The sound of pounding hammers and children giggling rang at the Old West Museum during Cheyenne Frontier Days — a symphony to Cheyenne’s leatherman, Rob Underwood, there to demonstrate an old-world skill to a brand-new generation. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily) 
The sound of pounding hammers and children giggling rang at the Old West Museum during Cheyenne Frontier Days — a symphony to Cheyenne’s leatherman, Rob Underwood, there to demonstrate an old-world skill to a brand-new generation. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily) 
The sound of pounding hammers and children giggling rang at the Old West Museum during Cheyenne Frontier Days — a symphony to Cheyenne’s leatherman, Rob Underwood, there to demonstrate an old-world skill to a brand-new generation. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily)
Potbellied Stove University
During the Great Depression, there were 120,000 cobbler shops in the United States. Today, only a few thousand remain — a sign of how rare this kind of handiwork has become.
“My father-in-law, after he got out of the war in Vietnam, they sent him to learn how to be a cobbler,” Underwood said.
He didn’t go to a school to learn his craft. Nor did he learn it from a YouTube video.
He learned the old-fashioned way, huddled up next to a potbellied stove with his grandfather during the winter. That was when they repaired saddles, halters, and all the other leather items needed on the ranch.
He didn’t glimpse the wider world of leather work until junior high, thanks to a required rotation through home economics, wood shop, and arts and crafts.
“If you didn’t want to do ceramics or painting, you could do leatherwork,” he said. “And basically, what I’m demonstrating here is kind of how I got started as a young man.”
At first, it was just to pass the time. He liked the idea of making something both beautiful and useful. And leather was so versatile. He could make anything he could imagine.
The sound of pounding hammers and children giggling rang at the Old West Museum during Cheyenne Frontier Days — a symphony to Cheyenne’s leatherman, Rob Underwood, there to demonstrate an old-world skill to a brand-new generation. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily) 
The sound of pounding hammers and children giggling rang at the Old West Museum during Cheyenne Frontier Days — a symphony to Cheyenne’s leatherman, Rob Underwood, there to demonstrate an old-world skill to a brand-new generation. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily) 
The sound of pounding hammers and children giggling rang at the Old West Museum during Cheyenne Frontier Days — a symphony to Cheyenne’s leatherman, Rob Underwood, there to demonstrate an old-world skill to a brand-new generation. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily) 
The sound of pounding hammers and children giggling rang at the Old West Museum during Cheyenne Frontier Days — a symphony to Cheyenne’s leatherman, Rob Underwood, there to demonstrate an old-world skill to a brand-new generation. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily)
Second Chances
The hobby became something more after he retired from a military career as a medic in 2015.
“I deal with vertigo,” he said. “Sometimes the room will spin. It’s damage from a bomb that went off and caused some problems, as they tend to do.”
Because of that, Underwood needed a service dog. But, to keep him upright, the dog needed a special harness.
Underwood worked with a physical therapist at Baylor University in Texas to design a custom harness that would let the dog subtly pull him back into alignment whenever his world tilted.
“That was the difference between me being in my house 29 out of 30 days, versus being here and able to do this,” Underwood said, gesturing at all the children pounding their wooden mallets onto butterfly and flower stamps planted on a strip of moistened leather — and giggling all the while.
Underwood no longer needs a service dog, but it helped start him down the right road, doing his physical therapy and learning to “trust humanity” again.
“So when I know there are veterans who have service dogs, I like to get with them and build them a harness,” he said. “And instead of charging the $500 or $600 that those typically are, I will let them pay whatever they can pay. Because, knowing what my dog did for me, I want them to have that opportunity as well.”
Keeping A Legacy Alive
As western culture surges in popularity, the number of leather items needing repair continues to outstrip the number of people who can fix them.
That’s lamentable to Underwood, and it’s one reason he’s always willing to demonstrate the craft whenever he’s asked.
“My biggest hope is someone will walk away and go online and go, ‘OK, I remember this hammer, and here’s that butterfly, and then they’ll start,’” he said. “And then, just like any trade, you work. You practice. People tell you, ‘You could do this better, you could do this different.’ And, eventually, you grow into people who do stuff like this.”
He gestured toward a magazine cover with carved leather plates that have been infused with beeswax, to make them stiff and waterproof.
“One of the things you can do is use leather and melt beeswax into it, and then put it at like 122 degrees and it becomes incredibly stiff,” he said. “So folks who didn’t have money to pay for ceramic or tile would make plates of leather.”
It’s also waterproof.
“You can wash the plates in water,” he said. “And you wouldn’t have to worry about it.”
Leather can do almost anything a person can dream up, Underwood said.
All it requires is for the next generation to pick up the tools and make something beautiful and useful.
The legacy Cheyenne’s leatherman hopes to pass on is simple. It’s to hear someone say, “My grandpa made this back in 1900, and it still looks great.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
