NOTED NEW MEXICO SHOEMAKER CAPTURES CLIENTS' SOLES.

Byline: Wren Propp Albuquerque Journal 

The cowboy boots Dave Gallegos made for musician Robby Romero of Taos, a member of the American Indian group Red Thunder, probably light up any darkened stage.

Romero's black stingray-hide boots appear to have an eerie power source - they even glitter from the shadows of an instant-camera photograph Gallegos keeps at his Square Deal Shoe Shop.

The boots Gallegos and his colleague Isidro Robeldo make aren't cheap.

They range from a few hundred dollars to thousands. But the price tags don't slow down demand, Gallegos says.

``We could sell them as fast as we could make them. But this process is very slow,'' Gallegos says.

A pair of boots, once all the measuring is complete, takes about a week, he says. ``We're not producing 300 boots a day. These aren't boots that you just buy off the shelves.''

Gallegos' customer roster reads like a Hollywood party guest list - Marsha Mason, Kevin Costner, Kevin Kline and Danny Glover all have their names on foot-shaped molds, or shoemaker lasts, at Gallegos' shop.

Gallegos' father opened Square Deal in the early 1930s. The elder Gallegos became a shoemaker by default. He attended a school in Colorado intent on becoming a machinist, but all the machine-shop classes were full. He took classes in shoemaking instead.

He set up shop in Colorado but found his customers couldn't pay for their orders, so he moved to Santa Fe.

There is an old office chair on the shop's concrete porch, and the late morning light on a recent day sneaks through the shop's windows past photographs, old advertisements, mementos and handmade belts and purses for sale.

Although customers have three thick comfortable chairs to sit on when they come to visit Gallegos and Robeldo, the rest of the shop is filled floor to ceiling with the materials, machinery and molds needed to make customized boots.

Gallegos' father's legacy is a room full of wood and metal foot-shaped molds. Each boot last begins as a plain, wooden shape of a foot, but when a customer decides to buy a pair of Square Deal boots, Gallegos or Robeldo carefully measures the customer's feet and adds finely shaved pieces of leather to each last to render an exact shape.

``My father was known as an orthopedic man, and we still deal with difficult feet. A person could have bunions or flat feet or high arches or whatever. When the last is exactly right, then the boots should fit perfectly,'' Gallegos says.

Sometimes, even the most careful measurements can be thrown off. Gallegos and Robeldo try three times, and if the customer still isn't satisfied, Square Deal buys the boots back.