We have a big announcement to make: F.M. Light and Sons has a new owner.
Don’t worry, it’s still in the family; Lindsay Dillenbeck represents the 5th generation to own the store!
She and her husband, Chris, assumed ownership of the store from her father, Ty, in September. The Steamboat Pilot and Today wrote an article about the big news. Here is an excerpt:
“When Lindsay (Lockhart) Dillenbeck still was in high school, she used to tease her father, Ty Lockhart, that the name of the family’s landmark Western wear store, F.M. Light & Sons, someday would be renamed in recognition of her gender.
‘It was a running joke since I’ve been in high school,’ Dillenbeck said this week. “I used to tell him that someday I was going to add ‘and daughter’ to the F.M. Light & Sons signs in hot pink.”
Today, the alteration to the historic yellow and black advertising signs that line highways across much of Northwest Colorado would be appropriate — minus the hot pink — but Dillenbeck never was serious. She is the great-great-granddaughter of F.M. Light. And now that she and husband, Chris, are the new owners of the family business, they wouldn’t consider tinkering with one of the West’s most enduring retail brands.
The Dillenbecks assumed ownership of the 107-year-old F.M. Light & Sons, 830 Lincoln Ave., from Ty Lockhart in September. F.M. Light & Sons dates to Steamboat’s pioneer days, and a visit to the store, with its old wooden floors and some original display cases, evokes the days when customers arrived in horse-drawn wagons. Today’s lines of merchandise bridge traditional cowboy and cowgirl fashion with the new. Lindsay Dillenbeck said nationally branded clothing lines are helping to keep Western wear fashionable by adding traditional elements to contemporary merchandise.
To read the rest of the article, visit the Steamboat Pilot website.
Photo by John F. Russell, Courtesy of the Steamboat Pilot
