Meet Ray & Phyllis - Hand Tooled Belt Designers
Ray and Phyllis Yeager are originally from Choteau, Montana. They both graduated from Montana State University. As a rodeo cowboy, Ray qualified and competed in two national high school rodeos and three national college rodeos specializing in bareback, saddle bronc, bull riding, and cutting horses. During his college years at Montana State University, Ray won the Bill Linderman Memorial Trophy and the first Cremer-Hart Memorial Trophy and Scholarship Award. Ray and Phyllis earned extra income by selling their belts while attending MSU. Ray had taken a leather tooling class in which he made a belt for himself and Phyllis and a few other items. Then he made belts for two cowgirls on the MSU rodeo team and after that their business boomed. Other team members wanted one and when the other teams of the Rocky Mountain Region saw these belts, they had to have one. Customer orders were placed at the rodeos and delivered the next rodeo. Ray did all the leather tooling, rising early during the school week, while Phyllis did the dyeing. They both buck stitched – some stitching was finished on the ride to the next rodeo. They could not keep up with the orders and after they graduated, they stopped making belts once they had “real” jobs. Over the years, Ray has continued leather tooling, but only doing so as gifts for family or friends – until now.