Artist behind S.A.’s giant boots leaves big shoes to fill
SAN ANTONIO — Bob “Daddy-O” Wade, a colorful, fun-loving artist who created the giant cowboy boots at North Star Mall that have been a San Antonio icon the past 40 years, once predicted they might outlive him.
That prophecy came to pass this week. Wade, 76, died of heart failure Monday at his home in Austin.
Wade’s other most celebrated works include a 40-foot-long iguana atop the Lone Star Cafe in New York; a 70-foot-tall saxophone in Houston; and his “Six Frogs Over Tango,” 10-foot-high dancing frogs installed on top of a nightclub in Dallas.
But the oversize, ostrich-skin boots at North Star Mall perhaps were his most epic and enduring work. He occasionally returned to San Antonio to repair and spruce them up.
In 2006, he repainted the boots caramel and oversaw their first renovation in at least a decade, including the application of a sealant originally developed by NASA to shield equipment from ultraviolet rays in space. The compound was spread on the lower portion of the sculpture to reduce fading.
Wade drew often as a boy and developed a fondness for longhorns, teepees and other icons of Texas and the Southwest while traveling with his father, who managed or worked at the Menger, Crockett and Gunter hotels.
Wade earned a fine arts degree at the University of Texas at Austin, where his friends in the Kappa Sigma fraternity nicknamed him “Daddy-O,” an allusion to the Beatnik era.
He later received a master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley and taught college art classes for 11 years in Waco, in Dallas and at the University of North Texas in Denton. He began as an abstract painter and shifted to photography, then to three-dimensional pieces.
The famous boots were built and displayed in Washington, D.C., in 1979 on a vacant lot near the White House.
The Rouse Co., a development firm that then owned North Star Mall, bought the boots. It had them shipped to San Antonio in 1980 on three 18-wheelers and installed in front of the mall.
More than 200,000 vehicles a day pass by on Loop 410. The boots, covered with urethane foam and painted to look like ostrich skin, were molded onto a steel frame that could be disassembled and reassembled.
Wade was called in 1982 to add a cement covering mixed with fiberglass to the boots, as a security measure. Vandals had broken off parts of the boots, marked them and even cut a hole in one and crawled inside.
Wade once spotted smoke coming from the boots and learned a man had been living in one of them, using Sterno to cook meals.
In 2015, the boots were recognized by Guinness World Records as the world’s tallest cowboy boot sculpture. Although they often are described as 40 feet tall atop a landscaped mound, Guinness recorded their dimensions as just over 35 feet tall, 33 feet long and 9 feet wide.
In 2002, Wade created colorful, airbrushed blowups of vintage photos of the Alamo, King Ranch and a trick-riding cowgirl in AT&T Center’s Saddles and Spurs Clubs.
In 2006, in a lesser-known piece titled “Junk Yard Dog,” he created a cartoon-style face of a dog smoking a cigar, fashioned from the body of a 1966 Plymouth Fury and hoods and cutouts from other cars at Alamo City Salvage on the South Side. In exchange, the salvage yard worked on his 1957 Chevy.
It was that same year that North Star Mall, then owned by General Growth Properties, recognized the distinctive marketing prowess of the giant boots and placed 8foot-tall, red letters spelling out the mall’s name behind Wade’s work .
“We want to have them around another 26-plus years,” Mollie Calvert, senior marketing manager for the mall owner, told the San Antonio Express-News in 2006. Wade was happy about that. “It makes me feel good that maybe I can leave something behind,” he said.