Emigrants and New Citizens

Elias Hecht and Helena Bamberger met and married in Hainstadt, in the German region of Baden, and Isaac was born in 1832, the first of their seven children. He was soon followed by Jacob, Fannie, Abraham, Louis, Marcus, and Henrietta. Revolution and turmoil rocked Germany in 1848, and the Hecht family made the painful decision to leave their country and emigrate to the United States. They ended up in Baltimore, where the children went to school and later looked for work. Like many of their fellow Jews, the boys went into the dry goods business, and, as soon as they could, they became American citizens.

Looking Westward

Sometime around 1856, the Hecht brothers followed the example of other Jewish merchants and headed for San Francisco. The Gold Rush created opportunities for businesses of all kinds, and with their dry goods experience, the Hechts knew they had a chance to make new lives in a new city. They founded their company in 1857 and named it “Hecht Brothers & Co.” choosing to become “jobbers,” or wholesalers, like fellow emigrant Levi Strauss. Their customers were the small general and men’s mercantile stores of the American West. Barrels of shirts, shoes, boots, hats, trousers, and coats arrived in San Francisco with every clipper ship, from east coast manufacturers. The brothers took the goods into their waterfront office and readied them for shipment out to their growing list of retailers.

California Manufacture

By the early 1870s the two companies--Buckingham & Hecht and Hecht Bros. & Co.--were taking out joint advertisements in newspapers around the West, and they each had a specialty. Hecht Bros., “Boots, Shoes and Leather,” had an office in Boston too, where brothers Jacob and Louis were now based. The firm was also the exclusive West Coast agent for the famed Hood Rubber Company of Boston, an early pioneer of athletic footwear.  Buckingham & Hecht touted their “Extra Quality” boots and shoes, and made sure everyone knew the products were made in California, putting wordy ads in the state’s newspapers touting the quality of California manufacture. Customers liked this idea, and by the end of the decade Buckingham & Hecht boots graced store shelves all over the West: Idaho City and Boise, Seattle, Tucson, and up and down California. The products shared space with another popular item for working men: Levi’s jeans. And the company also got a boost from the U.S. government: a contract to supply boots for U.S. Army troops based on the Pacific coast. The Hechts and Buckingham worked hard to make sure customers knew their boots and shoes were for working men of all stripes.

Big Decisions and a Few Goodbyes

In 1887 the partners made two big decisions: they incorporated Buckingham & Hecht, and decided to build a bigger factory. The place in Hayes Valley was now too small to meet the demand for their boots and shoes, so they bought a plot of land at the corner of Valencia and 26^th streets, in the Mission district. They constructed a huge manufacturing plant which got up and running by early 1889, and it was so impressive the company put an engraving of the building on their stationery and invoices. But some of Buckingham & Hecht’s officers would only enjoy the benefits of the new factory for about a decade. Isaac Hecht died in 1895, and Abraham Hecht and Thomas Buckingham died in 1898. Bereft of his brothers and their longtime partner, Marcus Hecht carried on.

Shaken Up, Bouncing Back

The earthquake of April 18, 1906 and the three-day firestorm which followed destroyed the financial heart of the city, and Buckingham & Hecht’s headquarters on Bush Street was not spared. The factory at Valencia and 26^th Streets was well out of range of the fires and it survived, though the building was badly cracked. Marcus Hecht and Lewis Wiel filed insurance claims and then got to work. They transferred all of their office operations to the manufacturing plant, and it reopened for production on May 7, barely three weeks after the disaster. By July, shoes and boots were leaving the loading dock and stores could advertise the famed Hercules boots again, along with its other products. One of these stores was D.S. Rowe in Grass Valley, California, which placed an ad for the Hercules in the Daily Morning Union with the headline “The Old Reliable Boot.” By 1908 the company headquarters was in a new building on Mission Street, in San Francisco’s rebuilt business district.

The Strongest Leather

In June of 1909 Lewis Wiel had the sad duty of planning the funeral of his partner and brother-in-law, Marcus Hecht. Now the president of Buckingham & Hecht, he carried the company’s traditions forward. He also introduced new ideas and products, with the help of his son, Elias Hecht Wiel, known as Eli, who had joined the family business. Buckingham & Hecht also made a splash in the shoe market in 1909 with the debut of Indian-Tan shoes and boots, “The Strongest Leather on Earth.” Choosing the word Indian for the proprietary name of their leather was a nod to the recent popularity of Native American culture. After Theodore Roosevelt invited a group of Indian headmen to join the parade for his presidential inauguration in 1905, American companies began to use the word Indian and feature indigenous faces on a variety of consumer items. And as they had done for decades, the managers of Buckingham & Hecht touted their California manufacture for the boots and shoes they made for hardworking men. By 1915 the company’s products were being sold as far east as Pennsylvania, and west to Hawaii.

The Jazz Age

The 1920s were all about the end of war and the beginning of Prohibition, which meant going all out to have fun. For many Americans, this meant spending time outdoors, and Buckingham & Hecht’s boots and shoes fit the bill. In 1923 the company introduced Buckstrips, a boot with a tough strip of leather sewed around the vamp for extra strength. Billed as “California’s Favorite Outdoor Shoe,” Buckstrips joined the Army Shoe as one of the company’s most popular products. In that same year, Eli Wiel and his managers released a Style Book of shoes and boots aimed at men and women who were hiking in national parks, riding horses on dude ranches, fishing in pristine streams, and doing heavy work from construction to carpentry. Retailers could order footwear with names that evoked all of this outdoor activity: The Yosemite, The Dakota, The Plainsman, The Sioux, The Trail, The Tourist, and many more.

 

Tough Times

The Depression of the 1930s was hard on all American companies, including Buckingham & Hecht. But president Eli Wiel knew he still needed to be creative and innovative to say in the market. New and interesting products made their debut in this decade: Oro-Peds, known as Health Work Shoes, made for people with narrow feet and weak arches; Loggers, a “low boot for every outdoor man;” the Marching Shoe, which took over after the company discontinued the Army Shoe in the mid-1920s; and the Riding Shoe, a fancy trim low shoe with a cowboy heel called “The Dress Shoe for the Buckaroo.” These products sustained the company through the 1930s, but many would disappear as World War II approached. All except one: the Buckbot, a sporty and form fitting boot introduced around 1935 and destined to become one of most iconic pieces of men’s footwear.

The Man on the Job

When World War II began in the United States, Buckingham & Hecht knew its boots were perfect for the men working in defense industries. They put this into the language of their advertising, as in this example from the San Francisco Examiner in March of 1942: “Welders, Ship Fitters and workers, requiring sturdy footwear, are properly taken care of when wearing BUCKHECHT shoes. Bucking & Hecht consider it their duty to offer to defense workers a shoe made for defense work service at reasonable cost to the man on the job.”

The Solnit Years

In 1950, the same year the company unveiled the Engineer Boot, Eli H. Wiel, president of Buckingham & Hecht, sold the firm to the Solnit Shoe Company of Los Angeles and San Francisco. Now 77 years old, the last member of the Hecht family decided it was time to pass the business into other hands. Ben Solnit had founded his firm in Los Angeles in the mid-1930s and later expanded to San Francisco. He knew the Buckingham & Hecht name was a powerful force in the shoe industry, and Solnit’s catalogs and advertising always called out the B&H name. Ben Solnit himself died suddenly in 1955, but the company managers kept up the tradition, and Buckingham & Hecht shoes and boots for men and boys continued to be front and center in marketing.Company catalogs in the early 1960s carried traditional and new Buckingham & Hecht products. The Engineer Boot, available in the still-famous Indian Tan, was the star of the collection called “Buckhecht Job-Rated Work Shoes.” New on the scene for boys was the wildly popular brown Desert Boot, worn by the Beats of San Francisco and the rockers of swinging 1960s London. But by 1967 the Buckingham & Hecht name, as well as its products, had faded from the Solnit line, and from memory. Then, in 1969, Solnit itself was sold to Volume Shoe Corporation, which became Payless Shoe Source in 1991.