When Jethro Pugh Jr. came to Dallas in 1965, it was to play defensive tackle for the rough-and-tumble Dallas Cowboys football team, which soon would become the legendary “America’s Team”.
But for the past several years, Pugh has based his new career as a gift-shop owner on the popularity of an older Western legend: cowboys who wear Stetson hats and pointy-toed boots.
Pugh co-owns and manages four Paradies-Pugh Western Shops at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. The shops are a successor to his first airport retailing endeavor, Jethro Pugh’s Gift Shop, which sold mostly sports memorabilia.
“At first, I sold a lot of memorabilia for the Cowboys, SMU and TCU, which were hot teams in the early 1980s,” Pugh says. “Then the Cowboys started losing, so I got together with another gift shop owner and started the Western shops.
“I really enjoy being out at the airport,” Pugh says. “I meet a lot of people who are coming to Texas for the first time, a lot of international travelers and celebrities, and a lot of Dallas Cowboys fans.”
Pugh, now 47, retired from the Cowboys in 1978, shortly after he bought a stately old brick home on Gaston Avenue. He worked at Texas Instruments for about a year, then worked in real estate prior to entering the airport gift-shop business in 1984.
In his spare time, Pugh is active at Trinity Lutheran Church, 7112 Gaston, and does volunteer work with a variety of area groups.
“I work mainly with anything that involves young people, to raise money for medical research and help senior citizens,” he says.
He divides his efforts between the NFL Alumni Chapter’s fund-raising efforts; the Dallas Black Chamber of Commerce, where he is a board member; Big Brothers/Big Sisters; Paul Quinn College, and Boy Scouts of America, where he is helping launch an “adopt-a-troop” program for corporate involvement.
“There are so many problems with our young people today, and this is one way we think we can get them in a healthy program,” says Pugh, who was a Boy Scout in his hometown of Windsor, N.C.
“When a young person puts on a Scout uniform, his or her self-esteem goes up.”
The Gaston Avenue neighborhood surrounding Pugh’s home of 14 years – with its crowded apartment complexes occupied mostly by low-income families – is a long way from the rural farming community where he grew up. But Pugh says East Dallas is his home now.
“It takes a special kind of person to live in East Dallas, someone who likes the ethnic diversity and the different types of people who live here,” he says.
Now that his children are grown, Pugh wants to sell the four-bedroom home and buy something smaller, preferably in East Dallas.
“You visit people in the suburbs, and it’s nice there, but it’s just not me,” he says. “There are a lot of wonderful people in this area.”
