EUREKA, Kansas – Of all the businesses you might expect to see in tiny Eureka, Kansas — population 2,332 — a master shoemaker from Italy making custom boots is likely not one of them.
Yet, this is where you’ll find Sam Vasta — “rhymes with pasta,” he says — quietly pursuing his craft in a small workshop behind his home.
His journey here has included stops in four countries plus a stint in a refugee camp after an earthquake in 2009 destroyed his home and business in Italy.
Before coming to Kansas, he was in Vermont, which he found too expensive and too far from the work he wanted to pursue.
“One thing that I wanted to get into was … making cowboy boots, and so I knew that the area had to be … Midwest to West,” said Vasta, who lives in Eureka with his wife, Aga, and teenage daughters Nina and Abby.
“So, I knew that there was an area that we wanted to be in, and then we started just looking online for potential houses. And that's kind of a how it happened.”
Here’s a summary of Vasta’s journey to Kansas: He was born in Italy in 1968 and moved to Rochester, New York, when he was 11.
He met his wife while getting a history degree at SUNY-Brockport. They moved to her native Poland in 2001 and back to Italy a year later to start his apprenticeship as a shoemaker.
In 2005, they moved to Ireland but returned to Italy in 2006 to finish his apprenticeship.
An earthquake in 2009 in the Abruzzo region of Italy killed more than 300 people. It also damaged or destroyed thousands of buildings, including Vasta’s home and workshop.
“It was really apocalyptic,” he said. “You had first responders from all over Europe, army vehicles. It was just a scene from a movie, it seems.”
Speaking of movies, Aga met actors George Clooney and Bill Murray, who toured the refugee camp the Vastas were staying in. She even got Clooney to autograph her CD from his movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”
Then it was back to Rochester in 2011 and Vermont in 2018 before finding Eureka on the internet.
“Pure coincidence, pure, you know, destiny, I guess,” Vasta said.
While landing in Eureka in 2021 was happenstance, Vasta’s love of the American West is not. He said he grew up reading the Italian comic book series “Tex,” which follows the adventures of Texas Ranger Tex Willer.
“So the whole thing, the Westerns made in Italy, the whole culture of the cowboy. My father even wanted to, before we came to the States, he was dreaming of a ranch,” Vasta said. “So that's how much we were .. Italian cowboys, in a sense.”
And Vasta said learning and appreciating the culture of an area and its people is important to his work.
“I think you really have to like the culture to really understand how to make a proper cowboy boot because (of) … the flare that a lot of the Western gear had … back then.
“They really expressed this through their boots, especially because there's the whole culture of dying with your boots on. So, it's something you have to sort of empathize in some way with the culture, I think.”
Vasta said he always loved shoes and footwear, and he also likes working with his hands, as his father did. His father was a butcher, but Vasta said he considered himself an artist, using his knives to expertly carve cuts of meat.
Vasta said making custom shoes or boots is also an artistic statement, both for the customer and for him.
“Shoes are an individualistic expression,” he said. “I think that's probably the prime motivator for people to spend that kind of money … that you need to spend on a custom pair of shoes. They want them to reflect some part of them.
“So, I take input from them during the first consultation as to what they would like in terms of leather, in terms of design, and I sort of synthesize those, and I put a little bit of myself into them. So, just like any other … artistic object, it comes out to be a creative expression of the maker.”
The day we met, a window air-conditioning unit was humming loudly as it worked to combat the Kansas heat. The wonderful scent of leather filled the workshop.
Vasta was wearing a pair of luminous burgundy wholecut shoes that he made. They’re called wholecut, he said, because the upper of each shoe is made from a single piece of leather.
Like all of the shoes and boots he creates, they were stamped on the bottom “fatto a mano” — made by hand.
When he first arrived in Eureka, Vasta spent his time fixing up his house and his workshop. He helps pay the bills by doing leather repair work and by making the hour-long trip to Wichita five days a week to work as an Uber driver.
“It offers that flexibility that allows me to also fix the house, fix the garage, and get the business going,” he said of his Uber gig.
He said his challenge now is finding customers willing to pay north of $1,000 for a pair of handmade cowboy boots. Vasta said it takes 56 different steps and more than two weeks to make a pair of boots.
“It's a niche business, and so you struggle to get the clientele that buys the sort of product that's custom-made,” Vasta said. “So, you're constantly in search of these clients.
“And part of the trick to the business is to be able to network, attend gatherings, parties … of people who could be part of your clientele. And so there's always that balancing act between production and networking. So, if you're out networking, you're not producing, and if you're producing, you're not networking.
“So, it’s a little bit of a catch-22.”
Vasta said he’s had some people inquire about getting boots made. And he hopes to launch a website soon that shows off his work, which also includes women’s shoes with matching handbags.
In the meantime, he said he’ll continue to pursue a passion that has taken him around the world.
“There's something marvelous about the whole process where you see something come to life, so to speak, that was in your head initially,” he said. “And then … to see the satisfaction and the happiness in the eyes of the clients, of course, when they receive something that reflects them, and they feel that it speaks of them when they wear them.
“I really love it.”
Copyright 2024 KMUW | NPR for Wichita
