My senior year in high school, I sold shoes after school and on Saturdays at Burnett’s Shoe Store in Paris, Tennessee, a branch store for the Union City, TN, main store.
The brands I recall selling were all produced by the Brown Shoe Company of St. Louis, founded in 1878: men’s Roblees and Pedwins, women’s Naturalizers and LifeStrides, and children’s Buster Browns.
After three years of carhopping, waiting tables, and soda-jerking, selling shoes was quite a move up for me. I got to wear a dress shirt, coat, and tie, and my pay moved up from 50 cents an hour to 75 cents an hour.
By coincidence, the owner’s son, Bill, was my age, and we became acquainted with one another — he in Union City and I in Paris — through our office-holding in our local Key Clubs, both of which were chartered in our high school years.
Almost 20 years later, when I moved as chancellor to the University of Tennessee at Martin, twelve miles from Union City, we became reacquainted and good friends. Bill inherited his father’s stores, closed the branches, and then died unexpectedly.
During a recent book signing in west Tennessee, we were pleasantly surprised to see the widowed Peggy Burnett and her grandson, Luke Burnett. Unfortunately, our visit was too brief for me to fill teenager Luke in on our connections with his grandparents and great-grandparents, ties that I recall fondly, just as I recall my year as a shoe salesman.
Our store, located in a prime corner of court square, attracted a sociological spectrum of customers, and the year spent there was an education in human nature.
There were all sorts of customers: some idlers who loved trying on shoes but seldom buying any; some regulars who knew exactly the size and style they wanted; some sacrificing mothers (the same who worked extra hours to earn money to get braces for their kids’ teeth) determined to keep their children’s feet healthy and whole; some bargain hunters; and some simply fascinated by the store’s x-ray machine that could be used to see how snugly a foot fit inside a new shoe.
I recall the special thrill of selling high-priced women’s lizard-skin shoes occasionally. They were the epitome of class. They may have sold then as high as $29.95.
But most of all, I recall the delicious smell of leather, such a contrast to the onion-and-grease odors permeating the food places I had worked theretofore. The only redeeming quality to today’s discount store shoe racks is that I get to smell the leather and feel the new shoes for myself, reminding me of the smells of 1953-54. Sometimes I go to the local shoe repair shop on the pretense of buying laces or polish, but mainly just to smell the shoe leather and to dust off some memories.
According to the Brown Shoe Company’s Web site, none of their shoes are now made domestically, even though it reported 1.8 billion dollars in sales. Apparently what has happened to the fabric industry in America, with mills closing at alarming rates and workers being displaced and pension funds erased, has happened in the shoe industry as well, just as it did in the steel industry and seems to be happening in some automobile and some technology manufactures.
The arithmetic baffles us. Our economy is fueled by increasing sales of goods and services annually, but the manufacturing plants of the nation that provide the wages for workers to buy goods and services are dwindling. Short-lived canvas shoes replace long-lasting leather ones as what most folks can afford. What we buy are, shoes included, mostly imports.
Efforts to prevent the imbalance between employment and spending by “Buying American” do not really address the problem. The only true solution seems to lie in creating more sophisticated jobs that require higher levels of education than the economies and workers of other nations can afford to provide. In turn, producing higher educated employees requires much more support of our public education infrastructure than recent times and affection for tax cuts have been providing our schools. Putting money in minds seems the only plausible way out in a consumption-based economy. We may have lost our soles, but we can rescue our souls by nurturing minds.
Larry McGehee, professor emeritus at Wofford College, may be reached by e-mail at mcgeheelt@wofford.edu.
