The author, John Marek, is a writer and executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
Every year, right after Halloween, my wife Janet removes a ceramic turkey the size of a softball from the china cabinet and places it on our dining room table. These days, the hole in the planter’s back sports a small arrangement of dried flowers, but it initially held a live plant whose purpose was to cheer up a sick little girl over the holidays.
When Janet was 4, she contracted pneumonia right before Thanksgiving and spent the whole week in an oxygen tent at the hospital. The turkey was a get-well gift from … the store where her family bought their shoes. That’s right. There was a time not all that long ago when a shoe store might send a gift to a sick customer.
In the context of the world today, that seems almost ridiculous, but the world wasn’t always like this. In small Midwest towns like the ones where Janet and I grew up – although Janet claims Ft. Wayne as her hometown, she grew up in a rural suburb called Waynedale – it wouldn’t have been uncommon to have that sort of a relationship with a local retailer.
Every pair of shoes I owned up until the age of 12 came from a children’s shoe store called Flippen’s in Sandusky, 20 miles from my home. Flippen’s was located just across the street from Sandusky’s central city park, which was noteworthy for its “floral clock,” a flower garden planted in the shape of a clock face with working hands that told the time. We didn’t go to downtown Sandusky frequently, but we would always go in late August for “school shopping,” and the clock was still in full bloom.
A visit to Flippen’s always started with one of the salespeople measuring my feet with a Brannock Device, that distinctive metal tool with the slides indicating length and width. Then the salesperson would go into the back and bring out three or four different pairs in the appropriate size for me to try on. It was more about fit than style, since school shoes for boys in those days were more-or-less uniform in design. I might also get a pair of “play shoes,” aka sneakers. P.F. Flyers were popular because of a commercial featuring Jonny Quest, which showed Jonny using his P.F. Flyer ring to help save Race Bannon from an erupting volcano. If you have no idea what that sentence means, I’m sorry you missed an incredible childhood. I did get my P.F. Flyers (and ring), but Mom wouldn’t let me have the red ones I wanted (red and white were our high school colors), saying, “What on Earth would you ever wear red shoes with?”
Yeah, Mom didn’t entirely get it.
I also remember the first pair of school shoes I owned that did NOT come from Flippen’s. A shoe “outlet” had opened at the industrial park outside of town, and it turned out that more-or-less the same shoes were available there for about half the price. For seventh grade, the first year of junior high, I got a pair of tan suede Hush Puppy loafers. I liked them a lot and couldn’t wait to wear them on the first day of school. Standing in the cafeteria line, though, the kid in front of me looked down and said, “I used to have a pair of shoes like that. Then we got off welfare.”
Okay, so maybe the shoe outlet wasn’t such a great idea after all.