Ken Griffin (saddler and magician)
American cowboy, leather worker, magician, and author (1914–1988)
Ken Griffin (1914–1988) was a Western cowboy, leather worker, magician, and author. As a leatherworker, Griffin helped transition leathercraft from strictly a vocation to an accessible hobby through his work and teaching. As a magician, Griffin and his wife performed worldwide with The Ken Griffin Show.
Leather artist career
Born in Jester, Oklahoma, Griffin grew up roping cattle, becoming familiar with horses and saddles from a young age. He began working at his first saddle shop under J.B. Williams at a saddlery in Deming, New Mexico, where he learned to make saddles, as well as tool and carve leather.
Ken found it more lucrative to stamp commissioned pieces rather than producing finished goods, so the majority of his work was on consignment from local leather shops.
Fascinated by the different regional techniques, Griffin would study catalogues from saddleries all over the country to gather ideas and blend styles. He pursued this variety, working at different saddle shops all over the Western United States, when he found himself at a saddlery in Flagstaff, Arizona. While there, he picked up some work helping with the horses on Howard Hughes’ The Outlaw, and ended up joining the crew back in Hollywood, California to finish the film.
While in Hollywood, Griffin worked for Ed Bohlin making saddles and leather piece work for films, later opening a shop specializing in quality hand carved goods.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Ken Griffin (saddler and magician)” is american cowboy, leather worker, magician, and author (1914–1988). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Griffin, saddler and magician, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “american cowboy, leather worker, magician, and author (1914–1988)” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q141272383. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1914 and 1988.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ken Griffin (saddler and magician)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.