Webster looks back on 50 years of T-shirts, concert tours and customers who became friends

FORT SCOTT - Billy Webster was a year out of high school in 1976 when he set up a heat press in a small former beauty shop and started selling T-shirts. He planned to take the business on the road.

Fifty years later, Shirt Shack is still in the same spot, and a photo of the original building hangs near the cash register.

The store is marking the anniversary with a three-day sale that began Thursday and runs through Saturday. All clothing is on sale, and customers can sign up for Ariat giveaways. The celebration ends Saturday with a block party in front of the store from 7 to 10 p.m., with music by Shades of Blue, food from Cohn's Cafe, and snow cones from Tiger Ice.

Webster said the idea for the business came from the custom car shows where he sold car wax as a teenager in the 1970s.

"That's when T-shirts were just kind of coming out," he said. "There's some airbrush guys there and stuff, and I started talking to a couple of them. I mean, they had lines all day long. So that's what I kind of want to do."

A friend who raced motorcycles for Clifford's in Pittsburg helped him get one of the shop's first machines, Webster said. He bought a supply of transfer prints and intended to travel with them, but customers kept showing up at the shop and at his house, so he stayed put.

"Well, then people kept coming by there and coming by my house," he said. "Till later on, till I got into concerts and stuff."

A local "Living Legend" and Alice Cooper

The concert business started with a cold call. Gary Webster, the longtime KOMB-FM disc jockey known locally as "The Living Legend," had interviewed Alice Cooper and gave his friend Billy Webster a number for Cooper's management. Billy called the number, which was answered by Cooper's manager, Vinnie.

The tour needed about 150 staff shirts, Webster said, and he offered to deliver them to Kemper Arena in Kansas City, the tour's second date. He and a friend loaded T-shirts, prints and a heat machine into his father's Lincoln and drove into the loading area behind the arena, where crew members tried to turn them away until he mentioned Vinnie's name.

Because he had not been given sizes, Webster told Vinnie he would need a couple of hours to print the shirts on site. The crew set him up in Cooper's dressing room.

"And then Don Cornelius from Soul Train and Burton Cummings from the Guess Who, they were in there talking, and I'm just printing shirts," Webster said. "'Hey, what are you doing over there?' I said, 'I'm just printing shirts.' They go, 'Well, that's just kind of cool.'"

Vinnie paid him in cash and handed him a backstage pass. He and his friend ate dinner with the crew and watched the show.

"That's all it took to get me," Webster said.

Cooper later had Webster print shirts for his mother's Native American jewelry store in Scottsdale, Arizona. Webster still lived at home, and when Cooper's mother called the house to place orders, she ended up talking with Webster's mother.

"My mom and Alice's mom got to be kind of friends, and so when my mom and dad went to California, they stopped by Alice's house," Webster said. "I look back now and I'm like, man, that was just kind of weird."

'We're just gonna call Billy'

Webster said the road work grew around 1981 after he became friends with Kansas City promoter Chris Fritz, who sent him to Joplin, Missouri, to handle a show. The T-shirt vendors he met there passed his name to a contact in San Francisco, who called him for help with shows on the West Coast.

Through it all, Shirt Shack stayed open in Fort Scott. Webster said he hired high school girls to run the store while he traveled. One of them, Becky Allen, worked for him at the very beginning, then quit, married and had children.

Years later, Webster was in New York and about to fire the employee running the store. He called Allen and asked her to fill in for a month.

"She goes, 'Okay, I'll go in and do that,'" Webster said. "And that was 21 years ago."

At its peak, Webster said, the concert business brought in about half of his profit. The local trade was the steady part, he said, and the road was hit and miss.

"Sometimes you might have three tours and then nothing for two or three months," he said.

Webster was working arena shows for MC Hammer around 1990 and 1991 when the opening act, Vanilla Ice, was outselling the headliner at the merchandise table. Webster said headliners typically wanted nothing to do with the opening act's crew, but he liked Vanilla Ice's merchandise manager, Bruce, and paid him to work alongside his own crew.

Bruce went on to run merchandise for major stadium tours and "got to be Aerosmith's main guy," Webster said. Bigger merchandise companies bid to supply those shows, but Bruce kept sending the work to Fort Scott.

"'We're just gonna call Billy,'" Webster said, repeating Bruce's line. "Cause I kind of did him a solid when he was not anything."

"He still comes to Fort Scott, and I go out there and see him," Webster said.

Woodstock '99 and retirement from the road

Webster was also at the infamous Woodstock '99, covering the show for a Canadian merchandise company that had printed shirts for him in the past. He pulled his crew off a Cher tour to set up and joined them after a show in Detroit

"I mean, it was scary." Webster said of what he encountered when he arrived at the festival.

"I walked in just like you walked into a different world," he said. "And so my guys were going, 'Get us out of here! Get us out of here!'"

By Saturday there was no security, Webster said, and the bands stayed on their buses. He watched festival attendees throw propane tanks into bonfires.

"And so that night I said we're getting out of here in the morning. I don't care," he said.

His van, carrying about eight people, left at daylight and drove as far as Columbus, Ohio, where Webster caught a flight home. The others drove on.

By the time he got home, the festival was on the news and his phone was ringing with people concerned for his safety.

"No, we got out of there last night, and I didn't even know what was going on," Webster said he told them.

Webster said he left the concert business about 15 years ago.

"We did that for 40 years, and then it just got to be too crazy," he said. "And I thought, you know, I haven't been shot or robbed. I'm going to quit while I’m ahead."

He still helps friends with the occasional show, he said, such as a friend touring with Yes who asked him to come up to the Midland Theatre in Kansas City.

'We're still kind of old school, here'

Webster said the biggest changes in 50 years have been computers and credit cards. When he started, orders went into a notebook. On the road, some bands did not take credit cards at all, and now some venues will not take cash.

The touring side changed too. Merchandise crews once traveled in their own trucks, he said, and now the shirts ride on the equipment truck while the crew rides the bus.

The store has moved more slowly.

"We're still kind of old school here," Webster said. "I needed to get an inventory control system years ago, but it's never — I'm kind of dumb on that stuff, so I just, I am old school."

"They've all turned into friends'

Customers came and went during the interview. One of them, Chad Cross, stepped in out of the rain.

"Hey, I don't want to bother you or nothing," Cross said. "I'm just enjoying the rain. But congratulations on 50."

Cross asked how old Webster was when he started. Webster said he was 17. And where? Right here. Webster pointed him to the photo of the first store by the register, and the two talked for a minute before Cross left.

"Thanks a lot, Chad. Means a lot," Webster said.

After Cross left, Webster said moments like that are the reason he is still in business.

"I would have never met him if I hadn't," he said. "I've got to meet so many people. That's just kind of my hobby, you know."

Asked what he would say to his customers after 50 years, Webster kept it short.

"Well, I just got the best customers ever, I guess," he said. "I mean, they've all turned into friends, you know."