Douglas Fairbanks (1883-1939) starred in the 1922 silent movie, Robin Hood, which premiered at Sid Grauman's Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, California. In equal partnership with Fairbanks and actress Mary Pickford, Sid Grauman opened Grauman's Chinese Theatre across the street from the Egyptian Theater with the 1927 premiere of Cecil B. DeMille's King of Kings. Before its opening, however, Grauman gave a tour to celebrities and during this tour, Norma Talmadge unintentionally walked across a wet cement slab leaving her footprints. Thus was born the idea to have movie stars leave their footprints, hand prints and signatures in the wet cement of the theater's forecourt. Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Norma Talmadge were the first celebrities to adorn the forecourt in this manner.

An action hero for his time, Fairbanks appeared in several westerns prior to 1919 including The Lamb (1915), Martyrs of the Alamo (1915), The Half-Breed (1916), Wild and Woolly (1917), The Man from Painted Post (1917), and The Knickerbocker Buckaroo (1919).

What is less well-known is that before Douglas Fairbanks left his footprints at Grauman's, he outlined his right foot to order a pair of kangaroo, 2-inch heeled boots. On February 25, 1919 Fairbanks ordered these boots from the Blucher Custom Boot Company. This transaction and his right foot are memorialized in a Blucher fitting book held in the Dickinson Research Center at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

Parallel to Fairbanks' career, the Blucher Custom Boot Company was incorporated in 1915 by G. C. "Gus" Blucher in Cheyenne, Wyoming. By 1919 Blucher moved his operations to Olathe, Kansas where it stayed until 1969 when it moved to Fairfax, Oklahoma. In 2001 the museum acquired 218 Blucher "Fitting Books" which are day books dating between 1915 and 1982 and used to record customer transactions. A typical entry on a Day Book page includes: name of customer, address, date of order, price of boots and payments made, style number, boot material and style preferences; special instructions, shoe size, and heel size; a carbon blue outline of customer's foot probably transferred from original patron order form; notation of date "out," meaning the date boots were completed or repaired and sent to customer.

There are other notable persons are represented in the early fitting book volumes. Rodeo greats such as Vera McGinnis, Lorena Trickey, Chester Byers, Reine Hafley; rodeo clowns, Pinky Gist and Red Sublett; and western actors such as Guinn "Big Boy" Williams and Buck Jones, all have unwittingly provided foot notes to history after a fashion.