Some artists work with watercolors, clay, or charcoal. Tom Nealey from Bloomington works in leather.
Nealey is a saddle maker with customers all over the country and even internationally. His equipment has been used in the national and international rodeo finals. His saddles sell for thousands of dollars each.
Nealey's saddles are custom-made to order and molded to fit the unique needs of each rider.
“Anything I can do to customize it, I kind of like. [It] makes it different. It’s not like a factory job that way,” Nealey said. “You can get leather in virtually any color. You can get designs on it. You want paisley leather, gold leather, silver leather, all kinds of different stuff. Even some with patterns in it.”
Nealey’s bread-and-butter are saddles for trick riders: the daredevils who do stunts and acrobatic feats while atop — or hanging from — a horse. Those kinds of saddles have an extra long seat.
“So they can get in and out of it real easily, because they’re jumping off, hitting the ground, and doing different things," he said. "It’s kind of a platform to work from, more so than a saddle seat."
They need to be durable, and dependable. Nealey doesn't go cheap. He buys high-quality leather in giant rolls. The best trees — or bases — upon which all that leather is shaped. Straps with a nylon core. Stainless steel screws.
But that craftsmanship is only part of the draw for Nealey.
“It’s the artistry. We’re creating it. That’s more fun to me than the craftsmanship," Nealey said. "You gotta do it right, but the artistry of coming up with the ideas, the designs, the colors, stuff like that — that’s the part that’s fun for me."
In the workshop
And he's done some creative stuff. Like a stunning bald eagle-inspired saddle with dozens of individually padded leather feathers, some with white tips. He’ll apply custom family brands, put silver on the back, find new color combinations.
It all comes out of his workshop, in the basement of the home he shares with his wife in Bloomington. There's often Ray Price, Lucinda Williams, or a podcast on in the background.
His workbench is where he does the tooling — basically hammering intricate patterns into the leather. That could be a basket-weave design, roses, cacti, sunflowers, or barbed wire.
It all starts by getting the leather wet. To make the pattern, he presses a small metal tool — like a scalpel — against the leather, then smacks it with a wooden mallet.
“The best bet is to really wet it down, so it goes really deep, then let it dry," he said. "When the surface is dry and you start tooling it and it makes that dark background come through, it gives it two shades. That’s really the best way to do it. Then you lay a pattern down on it — and I’ve got a bunch of different patterns for whatever I might be working on — then you take a knife like that, cut the pattern out. Then you start using these tools. You just go around the edge of it, pound them all out."
A life around horses
Nealey has been fascinated with everything western since he was a kid, growing up in southern Iowa. His dad was a horse trader, and he and his brothers would help break and train the horses.
Nealey followed his brothers into rodeos and even steer wrestling. He doesn't do that anymore but he still works part-time as a rodeo announcer. He has some horses here in town, and the youngest of his four daughters is an accomplished trick rider.
Trick riding waned in popularity for a few decades, with some seeing it as too dangerous, but Nealey said it's on the upswing again.
“The art has kind of come back," he said. "More and more people see it on TV, so now there’s a lot of young kids. There’s some competitions going on, so a lot more people getting interested in it."
Nealey made his first saddle just after high school. Later, he made one for his daughter, and people started asking to get their own. Now he's got a business.
He retired from Growmark about 10 years ago and started concentrating on saddle-making. He's done about 80 saddles since. He can put 60 to 70 hours into a single piece.
And he's still learning. Some of that comes from the repair work he does.
“I love doing that — an old saddle, tearing it apart, fixing it," he said. "You see how somebody else did it, maybe 50 years ago. Even newer ones, tearing them apart and saying, ‘Oh, there’s a shortcut they maybe shouldn’t have taken.’ Or, ‘I never thought of that, that’s something good.’ It’s a real educational experience, to tear someone else’s saddle apart and look at it."
Nealey is no one-trick pony. He’s also a heckuva musician. Before WGLT’s visit to his workshop ended, Nealey asked if he could play an original song, about getting older and someone’s “last rodeo.” Listen below:
