[ “If you never give up you cannot be beaten” – Keith Maddox ]
I went to the home of American Hat in 2015, in Bowie, Texas, and spent several hours visiting with Andre Trevino, the factory manager, and a few days gathering information on the story behind the company. To hear company president Keith Mundee tell it, it just wouldn’t be American Hat Company without the dedication of Andre and the other employees. The story goes that when Andre was 12, he saw a bag in the company’s parking lot. It was a bag of money that belonged to Bubba Silver. He picked up the bag, walked it into the building, and returned it. “I don’t want a reward,” Andre recalls. “I wanted a job. He said I was too young, so I asked if I could work in the evenings.” Andre obtained permission for school to get out a little early and he was hired as a cleaning boy at .90 an hour. 50 years later – Andre retired. “He was here at 5 a.m. every day,” Keith says. “He’s the most loyal, honest guy, and he loves hats. He says, ‘I would come to work here even if you didn’t pay me.’ That’s how much he loves it.”
It’s the power of the cowboy hat itself and American Hat’s mantra of quality that inspire that kind of devotion. But it’s a dream that nearly ended in catastrophe the year after Maddox moved the company to Bowie. On November 27, 2005, a grassfire swept through town; the blaze was so close to American Hat that firefighters used the parking lot as a command post. “The factory building wasn’t flamed out; it was smoked out,” Keith said. “The loss was devastating: $13.5 million in raw hat bodies and not enough insurance to cover it.” But Mr. Maddox kept the employees working. He ordered more hat bodies. He went into his 401(k) and second-mortgaged his house. He did everything he could to keep it alive. A lesser man would have quit. But his attitude was, I can’t quit — it’s this or nothing.
Rodeo News and American Hat unite in that integrity and grit. To Susan, Mercedes, and Treasure Maddox and Keith and Teri Mundee – thank you for believing in this dream and may both companies be blessed and remember that none of this would be possible without God – we are honored to be the stewards. As Keith Maddox told me many years ago, sitting at his home, “It’s not the destination it’s the journey – once you get close, you need to change the goal.” Well said Mr. Positive Times.
