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Glove story: eight months after its headquarters burned to the ground, and years after all its competitors moved overseas, the nation's last large-scale baseball mitt manufacturer is still in the game.

Article Excerpt
Driving down U.S. 82 in Nocona you see a familiar clutter of small-town Texas land--Queen, acouple of burger and barbecue joints, an auto parts distributor, some liquor stores, and a flyblown motel. You see something else that familiar too: decay, and abandonment. Tumbledown buildings, vacant lots, deserted filling stations, and empty storefronts testify to the town's 120-year struggle against recession and depopulation. Here in Montague County, 95 miles northwest of Fort Worth, economic annihilation is an ever-present possibility. Of the 33 communities that once existed in this patch ofrollingprairie on the Oklahomaborder, 26 are now ghost towns, victims of booms that later went bust: cattle, cotton, oil, and leather goods. Against all odds, Nocona, population 3,198, has survived. [paragraph] So it seemed an especially cruelturn of fate when, on July 18, the town's main factory, the Nocona Athletic Goods Company, burned to the ground. Worse still, Athletic Goods, as the town calls it, was no ordinary firm. It was an iconic, old-line, family-owned American manufacturer that had been producing baseball and soft ball gloves and other sports equipment under the legendary"Nokona" brand since 1934. (The difference in spelling is due to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's refusal to allow the name of an incorporated town to be trademarked. Both words refer to Comanche chiefPeta Nocona.) Its customers included Nolan Ryan, whose cherished first glove, purchased at age ten, was a Nokona. For many people, particularly in the Southwest, where the company has traditionally sold most of its products, the name conjures dusty, sepiatoned images of old-time ballplayers, of laceless and pocketless gloves, woolen uniforms, and crude baseball diamonds carved from wheat and corn fields. Nocona was the main supplier of ball gloves to American servicemen during World War II, shipping 250,000 a year. In the late forties its gloves were the only ones used by the Fort Worth Cats, of the Texas League. The company made other sports equipment too, mostly various types of balls and football padding. It was instrumental in the...

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