Collections is a series from The Show devoted to the things we acquire and treasure.
Bola ties have been Arizona’s official state neckwear since 1971.
They have a distinctly Western feel, so it makes sense that the Desert Caballeros Western Museum in Wickenburg has such a large collection — about 300 — of them.
The legend goes that in the 1940s or 1950s, a man named Vic Cedarstaff put his hat band around his neck because he didn’t want to lose it on a trail ride. This inspired him to design and patent the classic bola tie slide. He based the name off of a bola rope, which has a similar shape.
One of Arizona’s biggest bola tie — also sometimes called the bolo tie — proponents was Bill Close, an anchor on KOOL-TV for 28 years. He wore one on air every night, and the museum has his collection of over 200 bola ties.
Many of the museum’s bola ties, along with trophies from bola tie competitions and boxes of archives for the Arizona Bola Tie Society, live in the curatorial offices in the basement. Employees have to wear gloves while handling the ties so oils from their hands don’t damage them. The ties on display get rotated out for the ones downstairs every few months.
Mary Ann Igna, deputy director and curator at the Desert Caballeros Western Museum, shared more about the history of the ties and the collection.
MARY ANN IGNA: We are in the Wickenburg West exhibition, and Wickenburg is known for its bola ties. Vic Cedarstaff was here in Wickenburg back in the 1940s and 50s, and he designed one of the classic bullet ties and actually patented his slide. He was out on a trail ride one day and his hat blew off, and he didn't want to lose the hat band, because it was a really nice one, so he put it around his neck. And that gave him the idea, well, maybe he should make actually a tie that would go around somebody's neck. That was similar to a hat band. He was the one of the ones who really got the state legislature to make the bolo tie Arizona's official state neckwear in 1971.
When Mr. Cedarstaff created his version of it, he called it the bola tie, not bolo. There's quite a bit of controversy as to what it should be called, and he based it on the fact that the bola is a rope that's from South America that they use to capture ostriches and cattle and things like that. They throw the rope around the animal's feet, and it's called a boliadera. So he thought his bola tie looked kind of like that, whereas a bolo is actually a machete type knife. So that's why in Wickenburg, at least, it's called a bola. ...
There's one that's from the Navajo Nation Police Department. And it actually is a breakaway bola. So if somebody grabbed it, it would break. … So the police officer wasn't strangled by it. There's a little rattlesnake one. We had one gentleman one time was making them, one of our volunteers, and he made one from his pacemaker. It was a very expensive bola tie.
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