This week, as I prepare to celebrate my 66th birthday, my mind is on shoes. Why shoes?
Well, one reason is my $5 birthday reward from Kohl’s. A few years ago, I started applying it each year to a new pair of “sneakers” for walking. It’s a 3-year rotation. The new pair is used for my daily “exercise” walks, last year’s pair shifts over to light everyday use, and the oldest pair is relegated to yard work and clean-up duty.
But it’s also because these days, while on those daily walks, I find myself looking back a little more often than looking forward. That might just come naturally from being 66 where there is more past than future, or it might be related to the memoir I’m writing. Most of my thoughts that end up in writing are formed and worked out while walking, a few while sleeping. Whatever the reason, as I’ve looked back this month, a lot of my thoughts and memories involved shoes.
One of my earliest shoe-related memories took place on Castle Island when I was about 4. Growing up in Boston, family visits to Castle Island were a favorite after-dinner activity in the summer. Pile in the car, a short 5-mile drive to South Boston, grab an ice cream cone at Sullivans (vanilla for me), and walk around the “island” enjoying the cooling sea breeze. No air conditioning in our car or apartment in those days. Aside from the ice cream and the breeze, the best part of a visit was running up to the top of one of the grassy hills and rolling down. A great activity to combine with dinner and an ice cream. Anyway, on this particular day, I was about halfway up the hill and declared I couldn’t go any further. My father shouted up, of course you can, you’re wearing your PF Flyers (“Run Faster, Jump Higher”) and I was off like a rocket to the top of the hill.
Looking back now, I’m not convinced that those sneakers actually were PF Flyers, any more than the rice and veggie mixture my mother served us regularly was Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco treat. Our high-bouncing balls might not have been super and the version of the “plastic bubbles” that we created by blowing through a small plastic tube undoubtedly were a highly toxic carcinogen. But even without the official Wham-O products seen on TV, our flying discs flew and our hoops hula’d. We didn’t lack for anything, especially anything important.
When I was a bit older, I remember the trips to the factory store for a pair of Randy’s. We would make our way down the crowded, dusty aisles filled with shoe boxes in search of a new pair of sneakers, perhaps the “Bob Cousy” model.
I was starting high school when I saved up some birthday and holiday money to buy my first pair of Chuck Taylor Converse All-Stars, purple hi-tops, our school color. I wore those babies through high school and into college, long after there was any useful tread or consistent traction remaining. I was slow to make the switch to the new leather, Nike-style “basketball shoes” as they just seemed so big and heavy; and I already had genetics and physics slowing me down and keeping me close to the ground. As part of my mid-life crisis from a while back, I now have a canvas bag full of Converse All-Stars in assorted colors and holiday themes.
But my memories and family history with shoes runs much deeper than sneakers. Like many from the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston where they grew up, my Uncle Sal, worked at the Green Shoe Company, the local shoe factory, which you probably know better as Stride Rite. Throughout the 60s, he would show up at our apartment with a pair of shoes, a new style the company was working on, with the simple instructions to wear them every day and everywhere. A couple of weeks later, he would pick them up to bring back to the factory to see how they held up.
Fitting, I guess, that my first experience with field testing took place on a field. I got my first hit in little league wearing a pair of those dress shoes, a “triple” that ricocheted off the first base bag, bringing literal meaning to the coach’s mantra to be sure you “have your hitting shoes on.” It was a year or so later that I stopped swinging late and became a pull hitter. And thanks to another pair of those prototype shoes, I was the first boy in my elementary class to wear “buckle shoes” as the company tried to hop on to the latest fashion trend of the late ’60s. Those were a fun couple of weeks.
My uncle became president of the local union, but alas, the shoe industry, along with so many other manufacturing jobs, left Massachusetts and the United States in the 1970s. My uncle pivoted to industrial cleaning, managing crews in hi-rise office buildings in downtown Boston, and providing me with a job for the three summers after I turned 18.
Through high school and college, it was sensible black leather Oxfords from another local shoe company, Hanlon’s in Quincy Center, a block from the place I took music lessons, a few blocks from my “hair stylist” (still Italian, of course, like my original barber), and near the record store where I bought my first 45s and the occasional album.
Attending graduate school at the University of Minnesota, I continued to shop local, supplementing my boots for cold and boots for snow with Red Wing steel-toed black Oxfords. A choice that proved fortuitous when we were trying to run a computer cable under the temporary wall constructed in our ed tech classroom and I was able to tell my boss to just rest the wall on my shoe.
I could go on about my forays into saddle shoes and white bucks, but this post has to have soul as well as sole, doesn’t it.
My uncle wasn’t my only family member working at the Green Shoe. Returning home after serving as a Master Sergeant in the newly established US Air Force, my father, barely 21 years old (he graduated high school and enlisted at 17) chose a job on the factory floor at the Green Shoe over a potential scholarship to Stonehill College in order to appease his wailing, stereotypical Italian-American mother (no son of hers was going to be a bum). We’ll discuss cultural norms worth sustaining in a later post.
Of course, if my father chose college, he wouldn’t have been in the car that night his cousin drove downtown to pick up his girlfriend at New England Telephone, where she and her sister worked as long-distance telephone operators. He wouldn’t have seen said sister, declared to his cousin later that night that he was going to marry that girl, and I wouldn’t be here with $5 in Kohl’s cash in hand, thinking about shoes, and writing this post.
As I wrote in a previous post, it was basketball that led my father from the factory to the classroom, and a decade or so later to a B.A. and M.Ed. via night school and the G.I. Bill, and to a 50-year career as a teacher. Spending summers during those initial years as a teacher, working overtime in the shoe factory to make up the loss in salary that came with the move from factory to classroom. Some things never change, or change very slowly.
However, my father’s real “shoe story” pre-dated his work at the Green Shoe. The only possession from his childhood that he held onto was the shoebox he used while working as a shoe-shine boy outside of his grandfather’s bar, where his father worked as a bartender, the dimes he collected shining shoes contributing to the family’s Depression-era weekly budget. He used that box and those brushes to shine his shoes the rest of his life. And a replica of that shoebox for me was the only thing that the two of us ever built together. Wood, saws, hammers, and the rest were not a strength for either of us. Not quite sure where my shoebox is today, but my father’s sits in a special place in my office.
I would gladly report that I still use that shoebox to shine my shoes, but to be honest, I’ve only worn dress shoes a handful of times in the last decade – all thanks to the Center for Assessment and its annual Colloquium, held that year in Boulder, Colorado. I knew that I would be doing a lot of walking that week along the trails outside of Boulder. I won’t refer to what I do as hiking. Problem was that I didn’t want to try to fit an extra pair of shoes into my carry-on duffel bag. Solution, a pair of black-on-black Nike Air Monarch cross-training shoes that could function equally well in meetings and on the trails. My dress shoe days were over.
I did try to wear dress shoes at conferences twice last year, but it didn’t go well. First, for my trip to NCME in Philadelphia I packed a “pair” of dress shoes to wear for my presentation. Problem was, the left and right shoes were from different pairs, one square-toed, one pointed. Back to the Nike’s. I tried again at the NERA conference in October. One pair of not new, but never-worn, discount store Oxfords. Walking through the lobby to my presentation room, I hear the distinct flapping noise made by one sole almost totally separating from the rest of the shoe. Back in the elevator, to my room, and the Nike’s. Pretty sure someone up there is trying to send me a message via shoes. Leave those Oxfords in the past. Keep moving forward.
So, here I sit with my $5 Kohl’s Cash ready to select a new pair of shoes. For everyday wear, instead of the Nike swoosh, I go with New Balance or Reebok. Have to shop local, you know. Then I’ll begin another year of daily walks through the neighborhood closing my rings.
I’ll think about the past and ponder the future, because, oh, what interesting times we live in these days. Will the testing industry, as we know it, go the way of those shoe factories in Boston? Are we already well on our way down the path to that inevitable outcome? Will “state tests” in a few years look as different from today’s assessment programs as those leather basketball shoes did from my canvas sneakers? I certainly hope so, although from time to time, I do still pull on a pair of those Converse All-Stars or even my special edition PF Flyers.
Perhaps this year my shoes and I will venture out to some new and exciting places, one step at a time. You never know what’s coming around the next corner. That’s a scary thought, of course, but that’s also what makes it fun.
Embrace the Absurd 