At Billykirk, we have always drawn inspiration from vintage militaria. The craftsmanship, the honesty of function, the materials built to survive far worse than daily wear: these are the qualities we try to carry forward into everything we make. These three leather objects capture a small piece of that story. An early WWII M1907 leather rifle sling found in California, an O-ring belt bought in Greenwich Village in 1964, and my 20-year-old Billykirk No. 150 Claw Buckle Belt, handcrafted with a custom cast brass buckle from Rhode Island. One look at the hardware and the thread between them is unmistakable.

The M1907 Rifle Sling: Built for Two World Wars

The M1907 leather sling was standard issue for the U.S. military from WWI through WWII, designed for the 1903 Springfield and later the M1 Garand. It was a two-piece leather sling with an adjustable claw hook system that allowed a soldier to carry his rifle hands-free, stabilize his aim from a standing or prone position, and keep the weapon close in rugged terrain. It was, in short, one of the most practical and well-thought-out pieces of military kit ever issued.

The claw hook on the M1907 was brass during WWI and through the early years of WWII. By 1942, brass had been declared a war-critical material and was replaced by Parkerized steel for the remainder of the war. This means that the brass-fitted sling we found in California dates to no later than 1942, placing it squarely in that brief early WWII window when the old material standards still held. It's a transitional object: practical, storied, and quietly beautiful.

The claw hook itself is the heart of the thing. Simple, strong, and elegantly designed, it allowed for quick adjustment and held fast under pressure. Soldiers trusted it in the muddy trenches of France and on the Pacific atolls alike. It's the kind of hardware that, once you hold it, you understand immediately why someone might want to use it for something else entirely.

After the war ended, military surplus flooded into American life in ways both practical and poetic. Duffel bags became luggage. Field jackets became everyday wear. And the buckles and hooks that had held weapons, gear, and kits together found their way into workshops, flea markets, and the hands of craftsmen who recognized a good thing when they saw it. The M1907 sling was no exception. Its claw hook, designed for the pressures of combat, turned out to be just as useful in peacetime, once someone with the right eye came along to see it that way.

Allan Block and the Most Famous Sandal Shop in America

By mid-century, a self-taught leather craftsman, poet, and old-time fiddle player named Allan Block had recognized something in that same dependable hardware. Block opened the Allan Block Sandal Shop at 171 West Fourth Street in Greenwich Village in 1950, and for the next two decades it would become one of the most unlikely and legendary gathering places in American cultural history. My dear friend, the artist Jay Eisenberg, picked up one of Block's belts there in 1964, and returned the following year with his cousin Saul to buy sandals just before the two of them set off for Europe and Israel. He has held onto that belt ever since, a testament to just how well these things were made.

Allan Block seated with a fiddle during a 1961 jam session at his store that drew Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, in the cowboy hat. Sandals surrounding the impromtu preformance. Credit. Marvin Lichtner

The belt Jay bought, the middle one in the top image, is a single O-ring belt, and that was very much the point. By the late 1950s and into the 1960s, the O-ring belt, particularly the double O-ring belt, had become a quiet staple of American menswear, rooted in equestrian gear and sailing hardware, places where function and refinement had always coexisted. It fit naturally into the postwar world of chinos and loafers, relaxed but considered, slightly nautical, slightly equestrian. Ivy League style helped cement it. By the late 1960s, it had jumped the fence from the country club to the counterculture, pairing just as naturally with patched denim as with pressed cotton. Jay told me he had first noticed the O-ring belt on Harry Belafonte sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s. The way Belafonte wore it, that particular combination of cool and ease, made Jay want one for himself. He found his at the Allan Block Sandal Shop in 1964.

Jay wearing his Allan Block belt in 1973 and in March, 2026.

What made Block's version distinctive was that he had incorporated the M1907-style claw hook into the belt alongside the O-ring, drawn by the same qualities that had made that hardware indispensable in the field: its dependability, the elegance of its operation, and the way it looked. The ring was the focal point, but the claw hook was there too, a nod to the military surplus world Block knew firsthand. He was a WWII veteran, and he did not need to imagine what that hardware felt like.

Jay told me a story about those sandals that has stayed with me. In the spring of 1965, Jay, nineteen years old, and his cousin Saul, eighteen, bought their sandals and promptly set out hitchhiking through Europe before making their way to Israel. They had decided they wanted to truly understand what it would be like to walk in another man's shoes. The trip had its humbling moments. There were girls hitchhiking everywhere they went, Jay recalled, and the girls always got picked up first, without fail. Jay and Saul would stand in the pouring rain for hours, soaked through, looking, as Jay put it, like two sponges. Then two girls would stroll up not far down the road, stick out their thumbs, and the very first car that passed would stop for them. Such is life as a nineteen-year-old man.

In Israel, they kept noticing that every Arab they encountered, even men in traditional robes squatting by the roadside waiting for a lift, was wearing sandals made from rubber tires. Practical, nearly indestructible, built for a life on foot. Jay and Saul pressed on in their Allan Block sandals until their feet were bloody and raw. They had made their point. The one thing they drew the line at, Jay said with a laugh, was testing whether the sandals could walk on water at the Dead Sea. They were afraid the leather would get waterlogged and they would sink.

Block's sandals, custom-fitted with arch supports, became the footwear of choice for artists, musicians, and free thinkers throughout the Village. Faye Dunaway wore them. Joan Baez wore them. Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Doc Watson, Pete Seeger, and Maria Muldaur all stopped in.

Saul's Alan Block Sandals still have many miles left on them.

But what made the Allan Block Sandal Shop truly extraordinary was what happened after hours. Block was as much musician as craftsman, prone to setting aside his leather tools to pick up his fiddle the moment someone walked in with a guitar. The shop was just a few minutes from Washington Square Park and the Folklore Center on MacDougal Street, and the jams that started there often migrated to Block's store, where crowds spilled out the door and onto the sidewalk.

As the late Dave Van Ronk once said of trying to buy a pair of sandals there: "God help you." Music always came first.

Bob Dylan was among the regulars. According to Block's daughter, Rory Block (an accomplished accoustic blues musician), who later ran the shop, Dylan would come in just to sit and talk with her father while he worked. 'He'd be sitting in a chair, and my dad would be working, and they'd be talking,' she recalled. Allan loved to tell it: 'Bob Dylan came in those days before he played anything.' John Sebastian, Cisco Houston, and Mike Seeger were all part of the scene. The shop was, as one observer put it, "a folk music mecca hiding inside a leather goods store on a quiet Village block."

Block decamped for New Hampshire in the late 1960s, and his daughter, Rory, carried on the shop for a time. The address at West Fourth Street and Jones Street, the same block photographed on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, is now a cafe. But the spirit of what Allan Block built, that integration of craft and art and community, never really went away.

For a few decades after Block headed north, that particular combination of claw hook and leather went quiet. The O-ring belt endured in its various forms, cycling in and out of fashion the way good hardware always does. But the specific sensibility Block had brought to it, the veteran's instinct for quality materials and clean function married to a craftsman's eye, was harder to find. It took someone stumbling across the right object at the right moment to bring it back.

Billykirk No. 150: The Claw Hook Lives On

In 2005, we launched the No. 150 Claw Buckle Belt in California, the same state where this original early WWII sling was found. The claw buckle on the No. 150 is a direct descendant of that M1907 claw hook, cast in brass and white bronze by craftsmen in Rhode Island. Like its ancestor, it's built to last, simple in its operation, and distinctive in a way that rewards anyone who looks closely.

We were not the first to see the civilian potential in that hardware. For years, we thought we had come up with the idea ourselves, and it was not until Jay showed me his belt from the Allan Block Sandal Shop a couple of years ago that I had my aha-moment. There it was, that same claw hook, incorporated into a beautifully made O-ring belt, a secondary element but unmistakably there. It stopped me in my tracks. I had assumed Block had perhaps seen soldiers coming home from the war with their slings, or that maybe a father or uncle had brought one back. As it turns out, Block had served himself. He already knew that hardware from the inside.

More recently, I came across the 1957 Harry Belafonte record, Belafonte Sings of the Caribbean, and it deepened the story further. On the cover, Belafonte is wearing a belt almost identical to the Billykirk No. 150 Claw Buckle Belt, without the O-ring, just the claw hook — a pure, clean version of the same hardware. Dig deeper, and you find photo after photo of him wearing O-ring belts in the press, on stage, and in Island in the Sun that same year. 

Belafonte had deep roots in Greenwich Village, having co-owned the Sage Coffee Shop on Seventh Avenue South near Bleecker Street in the early 1950s, just around the corner from Block's shop on West Fourth Street. During those same years, he was taking acting classes at The New School's Dramatic Workshop, studying alongside Marlon Brando and Bea Arthur, and was a regular at the Village Vanguard near Sheridan Square. The bohemian triangle between Sheridan Square, Washington Square Park, and the blocks in between was very much his territory. Both men moved in the same musical circles, and on any given Sunday afternoon, the distance between them could have been measured in city blocks. And there is one more thread worth pulling: Belafonte's second wife, Julie Robinson, was a dancer, actress, and costume designer who later designed his touring costumes. Someone with that kind of eye for style and always in the know would have found their way to a shop like Allan Block's. The more you look, the harder it is to call it a coincidence. Block was the man in the Village making exactly these belts, and the simplest explanation is usually the right one: Belafonte was a customer.

Allan Block got there before us, working leather in Greenwich Village while Bob Dylan sat in the corner and the music poured out onto the street. But I like to think we are part of the same long conversation about what makes a well-made thing worth carrying through life.

Three pieces of leather across three eras. An early WWII sling built for a soldier heading into the Second World War. An O-ring belt made by a fiddling sandal maker in the heart of the folk revival, bought in 1964 by a young man who had seen Harry Belafonte wearing one and never forgot it. A handcrafted belt with a custom cast claw buckle, designed in California, cast in Rhode Island, and now finished by hand in New Jersey.  All connected by one ingenious piece of hardware that has refused, across more than a century, to be forgotten.

Shop the No. 150 Claw Buckle Belt HERE

Artist, Jay Eisenberg