Cowboy Turned Bit And Spur
Maker Because It Paid Better

By David Bowser

PAMPA, Texas — When Billy Klapper first started making bits and spurs down around Paducah, only one other fellow in the neighborhood was making them, and that was the legendary Adolph Bayers.

Klapper owned a pair of Bayers spurs one time. He gave $60 for them. He later sold them for $2000.

"Then I turned around and gave $2000 for a pair that had my name on them," Klapper says, sitting at his work bench, grinning.

In effect, he says, he traded spurs.

"I still only have $60 in them," he laughs.

When Klapper first started, he didn't put his name on any of them, he says. He started putting his name on them and numbering them around 1966.

Klapper had one pair of spurs that he particularly liked. Several people tried to buy them, but Klapper had priced them where he didn't think anybody would buy the spurs. A woman finally met his price.

"I'd been wearing them for two years, and she went and bought them," he says.

With more than three decades of experience behind him and hundreds of spurs to his name, Klapper is about to start the most intricate pair of spurs he's ever made. Ordered by a man in England, they will be stainless steel overlaid with solid sterling and with gold designs.

"That's quite a job," he says.

The man called Klapper and described what he wanted.

"I told him, 'Man, I don't know what those are going to cost," Klapper says. "He said, 'I don't care what they cost. I want them.' They're going to be pretty."

Most of the people who order spurs from Klapper have a name or initial put on the band of the spur.

"Here the last few years, they've got a lot of flowers and leaves," he says. "It really sets a spur off."

But a Klapper spur is more than just a work of art. They are art that's meant to work. Klapper knows from experience the wear and tear a cowboy can put spurs through, so he makes them rugged enough to hold up, even if they're never worn and hang only on the wall.

Klapper makes his spurs out of one solid piece of steel except for his polo spurs.

"I make a one piece spur," he says. "I don't weld the shank on."

He starts with a round steel rod, flattens one end for the shank, then splits the other end to make the band that goes around the boot heel. He used to use Ford axles because they provided good tempered steel, but now he orders his steel rods.

Klapper says he welds shanks on the stainless steel spurs he makes for polo players, but he has to be careful.

"You get a good bead, it won't break," he says.

It was when he was working at the Y Ranch that he met his first polo players. Some of them came in to help gather cattle in the fall.

At the time, Adolph R. Bayers lived nearby. He was the number one bit and spur maker for the polo people at the time.

"When I started, me and him were about the only ones around," Klapper says. "The polo people bought some from me, but mostly from Bayers. Boy, his stuff got high when he died."

Now, there are some 19 spur makers in the area. But Klapper is established enough that they don't bother him, although he gets a fair number of them wanting him to teach them how to make bits and spurs.

He shrugs. Most of it is experience, he says, and that can't be taught. It has to be learned.

Klapper has 799 different bit patterns and 653 spur patterns. He keeps them all on file so if a customer loses one, Klapper can replace it.

"If they lose one, they'll send the other back and I'll match it," Klapper says. "I do quite a bit of that."

It takes an average of about nine hours to make a bit. It's about the same to make a pair of spurs.

"Some of them I can make in eight hours," he says. "Some of them, it takes two days."

A day for Klapper is a cowboy day. It lasts from sunup to sundown. He's in his shop every morning a little after 6 a.m. It's another 12 hours before he calls it a day.

Originally from Lazare, Texas, Klapper grew up south of Childress. There were five girls and Klapper in his class when they shut the school at Lazare down and moved the students to Quanah.

Klapper helped the local farmers and ranchers in the area there until he was about 20 years old. He worked for the Buckle L Ranch near Childress and the Triangle Ranch near Paducah. He was working at the Y Ranch southeast of Paducah when he first started making bits and spurs.

"I needed some bits," Klapper says. "We had a foreman there who said I could make what I wanted."

The first bit he made was for himself, and it worked well.

"I worked at cowboying pretty hard for about four years," he says.

He was making bits and spurs and cowboying in those days, but the hours were long and hard. He knew he was going to have to give one of them up.

"I gave up cowboying," he says. "It didn't pay as much as this did."

Klapper left the Y Ranch to go to the Open AL Ranch near the community of Truscott, between Crowell and Benjamin.

"That's when I quit cowboying, in 1968," Klapper says.

He opened a shop in Childress and turned his efforts to making bits and spurs.

"It was the first of March in '68," he recalls. "I moved up here in 1973."

Again, it was the first of March.

"Come the first of March, I might move," he laughs.

He moved to Pampa to marry a woman named Roberta, the same woman he's been married to for 25 years.

At first, he worked in the corner of an automobile body shop. His customers used to come to town looking for him. The man who had the convenience store on the corner told Klapper he was tired of giving directions, that Klapper should get a big sign and put it out front.

Now Klapper has his own shop down the street, and he did put a sign out front. It's not a big sign, hardly big enough to see from the street. It's a metal sign that Klapper made right there in his shop, but for those who know what they want, it's big enough.