Restorer of Buggies Takes Life at a Comfortable Trot

The side roads in Slick are barely wide enough to carry some of the elaborate carriages and covered wagons that are built in the abandoned schoolhouse at the top of the hill.

But these carriages have other paths to beat, anyway, like country lanes on Southwest prairies. And the Fiesta Bowl parade in Tempe, Ariz., or Club Med in the West Indies.

Paul Montgomery, 67, returned to his hometown when he retired from the Air Force and began restoring and building carriages as a hobby.

It is a hobby no more.

Montgomery has a catalogue and a group of dealers who alert horse-and-buggy aficionados to the meticulous work that goes on at the Carriage House and Coach Shop in Slick, a Creek County town that takes about 40 seconds to drive through in a car. A little longer in a buggy.

“We have lots of people who say they can’t even find it on the map,” Montgomery said. “I tell them to go 35 miles southwest of Tulsa as the crow flies, and there you are.”

There, in an old schoolhouse left vacant when Slick consolidated with Bristow several years ago, Montgomery and a neighbor, Neil Groom, restore or build just about every carriage ever made.

Want a Lincoln Landau, the kind Honest Abe used to ride? Montgomery will get blueprints from the Smithsonian Institution and have it for you in no time.

Montgomery holds a doctorate in engineering from Oklahoma State University. He was struggling with personnel problems with his Air Force job in Ohio, where he was on a research team for the Apollo space vehicles, when he turned to his roots for help.

“I needed a diversion, so I got a couple of horses and took them back to Ohio. I thought I’d try riding them,” Montgomery said. “That was not too popular with my wife because she doesn’t like to ride.

“Then, lo and behold, I saw these Amish people. They appeared to have a subdued lifestyle,” he said. “I took my horses up to the Amish community and bought some of their buggies.”

By the time he retired in 1971, he had collected 10 buggies. He figured he would enjoy them for an occasional ride in the country when he retired and returned to Slick.

“Well, I didn’t,” he said. “I began to blueprint them. And I noticed that parts of the carriages, buggies and surreys had a lot in common. So I began to restore one or two. It’s addictive.”

Groom, an interior decorator, had moved to Slick to take over his grandfather’s ranch. Montgomery asked him for help in refurbishing carriage insides.

“It started in the garage, very innocently,” Montgomery said. “When we got done with the first one, someone came by and said, ‘I’d like to buy it.’ We didn’t think anything about it.

“Then we did another one and the same thing happened, and we still didn’t think anything. But every time we finished one, someone was there to buy it.”

The first one sold for $2,750. Now Montgomery and Groom sell about $100,000 in carriages, buggies and carts each year.

“Our culture has an affinity for the wagon, particularly in states that were settled out of the wagon,” he said. “We never could seem to get away from that. The wagon is very popular nowadays with trail riders or people getting back to family-centered activities.”

His latest carriage is for a woman who wants to take her grandchildren for rides in the country. He says Club Med bought a wagon when more married couples with children began patronizing the resort.

But on days when he has more orders than he knows what to do with, Montgomery thinks of his Amish friends, those in Ohio and in Oklahoma whom he talks to on the phone, “those of them who have phones.”

“Everything in the world changes except the Amish,” he said. “They have a pace, and if you want to live at their pace, fine. If not, that’s fine, too. I admire that in them. I envy their lifestyle.”