The president's shoes

     Yesterday's post on my uncharacteristic purchase of a pair of ostentatious shoes, and a visit to the Wisconsin factory that made them, left it up to the readers whether to post the second part, or to hurry on to other topics. To my gratification, everyone was unanimous in wanting to see it. So here it is.

     When George Washington pressed his lips against the Bible after being sworn in as this nation's first president on April 30, 1789, he was wearing a suit of brown broadcloth, donated by proud Hartford weavers. John Adams was wearing the same suit, cut from the same cloth donated by the same weavers. "They might have been dressed as twins," wrote David McCullough, "except that Washington's metal buttons had eagles on them."
     The history of commerce coveting the limelight of the presidency is lengthy. Hatters sent stovepipes to President-elect Abraham Lincoln.
     With this in mind, during a visit to the Allen Edmonds shoe factory in Wisconsin, my attention was drawn to letters and photos of recent Republican presidents.
     "Reagan's father was a shoe salesman," said spokesman Colin Hall. "And sold our shoes, loved our shoes."
     "In Chicago," I interjected.
     "President Reagan was a huge fan and wore our shoes all the time," Hall continued. "He convinced Bush Senior to wear our shoes, and they started a neat little thing where every inauguration they wore Allen Edmonds. It carried on with Clinton and Bush Junior. The only man not to wear our shoes at his inauguration was Obama. He wore shoes made in China—Cole-Haans."
     "No!" I gasped.
     "They asked us for shoes, so we sent them shoes," said Hall. "But we looked at all the pictures, and he's not wearing our shoes. The reasons we decided not to say anything about it is the world was falling apart at the time, the last thing he needed was this company in Wisconsin throwing shoes at him."
     Everything about Obama spawns a conspiracy theory, and this is no different.
     "Made in China," mused Hall. "Why would he do that?" The obvious answer, Hall said, is that a favor was owed to Nike founder Phil Knight, whose company owns Cole-Haan.
     "Look at Obama as another athlete being paid by Nike," he said.
     In fairness, I couldn't find any evidence that Obama is indebted to Knight or would feel compelled to wear his shoes. But what chance has truth compared with a good story?

DO THEY SMELL?
     Had Obama worn out his Allen Edmonds shoes working the corridors of power, he could have shipped them back to the factory for refurbishing—buying a quality shoe is like buying a car, in that they service it.
     Every day, up to 100 pairs of old, shabby, scuffed, soaked, moldy, broken-down Allen Edmonds shoes arrive in the mail ("Do they smell?" I asked a worker, who emitted a rueful laugh. "Especially in summer," she said).
     The company does something very high-tech— it first takes a digital photo of the battered footwear, posed fetchingly against a white background—then, after the sole is stripped off and the shoe rebuilt, it takes another of the finished product and e-mails it to customers, to say their reborn shoes are on the way. "Remember these?" the e-mail asks.
     One customer, sending in his departed father's Allen Edmonds to be refurbished, asked that his ashes be blended into the hot cork mixture applied between the sole and the shoe. The company complied.
     One last thing, before we bid adieu to the world of shoe manufacture. The company owns a specialty lumber mill, in one of those odd business connections one sometimes finds (My favorite: Coors brewery once owned a large toilet bowl factory, not due to the usual beer/toilet dynamic, but because they made their own beer kegs, and the kegs were lined in porcelain).
     So Allen Edmonds owns Woodlore, a nearby lumber mill because . . . ready? . . . they were having trouble getting a reliable source of cedar shoe trees, so they went into the business in order to guarantee supply.
     And here I thought nature was the only source of wonder.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times March 28, 2010

Baby's got new shoes

     Shopping at Nordstrom's Rack on a Saturday is not my idea of fun. But it was mid-afternoon. I'd been working away since 5 a.m. My wife invited me to come along. It seemed a festive outing. 
      Now, it just so happened that these patent leather Oxfords with red stitching were just sitting there, in my hard-to-find size, 8 1/2EEE. Which normally I wouldn't touch, but as it is, I'm master of ceremonies again this year for the Night Ministry's fancy black tie charity ball at the Standard Club—June 4, if you're interested—and it struck me that I should get formal shoes to go along with my tux.  Street shoes made me feel, well, not quite dressed to the 9s as a master of ceremonies should be.
    The red stitching threw me off. I'd have to wear them with a red bow tie and cummerbund.  Some consultation was in order.
     "Honey," I asked my wife, holding up the shoes. "Do you think I can get away wearing these with my tux?"
     "You don't have to be boring all the time," she replied, and I must have looked like a puppy that had been stepped on, so she elaborated: "When I met you, you would wear these bright-colored shoes."
     Boring AND a shadow of my former flamboyant self. Thanks honey.
     That sealed the deal. Well, that and the fact they were 2/3 off, and made by Allen Edmonds, whose Wisconsin factory I visited five years ago, and developed brand loyalty toward, if you can have brand loyalty for a product you don't actually own.  This is the report I filed:

     Precisely 120 miles due north of the Wrigley Building is the largest men's shoe factory in the United States, the Allen Edmonds Shoe Corp. in Port Washington, Wis.
     There—not in China, nor in India—sheets of calfskin, miles of thread and gallons of glue are turned into about 1,000 pairs of men's shoes every day. Shoes whose given names — Bradley and Kendall, Grayson and Maxfield, Ashton and Powell—evoke both boardroom elegance and, at least to me, the class roster of a North Shore preschool.
     I spent hours prowling Allen Edmonds on Monday, and the good news is there's absolutely nothing moribund, doomstruck or woebegone about the place—it is perhaps the cleanest factory I've ever visited, with the possible exception of a flatbed scanner plant in Taiwan, and there we had to wear white paper suits and go through an airlock to blow the dust off our clothes, so it's an unfair comparison.
     A quality shoe is constructed around a foot-shaped form called a "last." But I must pause, before getting bogged down in the 200 steps it takes to make a shoe, from the person who circles imperfections in the hides so the pieces that become a shoe can be puzzle-cut around them, to the man who grinds away a small corner of each inner heel, so it doesn't catch on the cuff of your suit (as someone who has wrecked his share of pants cuffs on the knife point heel of my Church's wing tips, I particularly admired that detail).
     The true wonder of Allen Edmonds, beyond the fact that they will custom make a pair of size 21 AA brogues in purple leather for you, if you so desire, is that it's still in Wisconsin, since 1922, despite the triple whammy that gutted most of the American shoe industry.

WHAT WE DO MAKE: DEBT, FANATICS

      First, cheap foreign labor. Since 1968, some 98 percent of America's shoe production has tap-danced overseas. The Brown Shoe Co.— which made St. Louis into a shoe-making center, introducing Buster Brown Shoes at the 1904 World's Fair there—closed its last American factory 25 years ago. Cole-Haan stopped making shoes in Maine in 1999. Florsheim began in Chicago in 1892 and closed its last Illinois plant 100 years later
     You get the picture.
     Allen Edmonds employs about 300 people at the factory—with another 300 at stores and warehouses—and was purchased in 2006 by a Minneapolis private equity firm for $123 million. Its most dramatic change since then has been to open a small hand-stitching operation in the Dominican Republic—not, spokesman Colin Hall vows, as the vanguard for any overseas move, but to boost its casual line.
     American manufacturers survive by working the niches, and Allen Edmonds capitalizes on the fact that human feet range greatly in size.
     "Most guys are between an 8? and 11, most are D widths, which is the medium width in America," said Hall. "So people manufacture in that core size, and if you're a brand, and don't do your own manufacturing, you're basically buying from a company in China or India. You're going to buy heavy on the center of that bell curve, because you know you'll sell the most there. We'll have the bell curve, but we'll also have the extremes, we have 6AA, we can make you a size 23 EEE."

BUT THESE KLEENEX BOXES WORK FINE!

     The second blow has been style -- a young man who a decade ago went to work in khakis, a dress shirt and penny-loafers is now showing up in cargo shorts, a T-shirt and flip-flops that cost a penny to be shot-injected into a mold in Szechwan.
     Allen Edmonds has been trying to surf this trend by creating a range of casual shoes, such as white slip-ons stitched in red, meant to resemble baseballs.
     The third factor scuffing the shoe industry, whether domestic or foreign, is the recession, which hit quality men's shoes especially hard, since one of the attractions of a well-made shoe is that it lasts, and when times are tight you can give yours a quick buff and get by for another few months. Allen Edmonds shoes are not cheap—they start at $125 a pair and sail off to $500 and beyond.
     How tough has the recession been on the shoe business? In 2008, 2,300 shoe factories closed . . . in a single province in China.
     Allen Edmonds fights to stay alive through an intriguing blend of high and low tech. It might be applying the name of each shoe in gold letters, one sole at a time, by a worker at a machine, or burnish the finish of each toe over an open flame, but a running tally of the current daily production quality is displayed on a big electronic board on the factory floor.     
     Who'd have thought that a shoe factory would exceed my one topic/one column policy? But I haven't even told you about the guy who requested that his father's ashes be molded into the soles of his shoes. Nor about Barack Obama's regrettable bow to Chinese totalitarianism at his inauguration, and how Allen Edmonds struggled to stop him—a true treat for all those readers who spend their days searching for things to blame on Obama, with the added bonus of actually being true.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times March 26, 2010

This, obviously was the first of two parts. Since I don't want to overwhelm you with any given topic—I learned my lesson with the puppets—I'll leave it up to you whether we go with the second half of my Allen Edmonds visit tomorrow or feature whatever I write for the newspaper instead. Thoughts?

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Would it be unfair to leave you only with this rather shabby and dimly lit bedroom, with its particle board interior? Frankly, my gut tells me you could crack it from that alone. But I don't want to be too maddening—the goal of this contest is to challenge, not infuriate. So I'm going to include another picture from today's mystery location, as a clue. Where is this place? And why is it on fire?

    The winner will receive one of my way cool—to me, anyway, the winner last week didn't claim it—2015 blog posters. Please place your guesses below.  Good luck.

Cardinal Francis George, dead at 78

     Personally, I was not a fan of Cardinal George. I found him harsher than he needed to be, and resistant to the new style embodied by Pope Francis. But I admired the cardinal's fidelity to the tenets of his faith, and his scholarship, and tried to write an obituary that was fair and accentuated his good qualities.   

     The day after Cardinal Francis George stepped down as leader of Chicago’s 2.3 million Catholics was a Sunday and Eleanor Franczak, a parishioner at St. Michael’s Church in Orland Park, summed the cardinal’s tenure this way: “He was one of us. He wasn’t any better or worse, just a normal person.”
     It was an assessment that Cardinal George, who died Friday morning after a nine-year struggle with cancer, would have wholeheartedly endorsed. When he learned that Pope John Paul II had named him as the successor to Chicago’s popular Cardinal Bernardin, the unassuming priest asked in surprise, “Are you sure the Holy Father has considered all the options?”
     But that modesty concealed a man who was an accomplished scholar, a skilled writer, and an unyielding defender of the faith. Raised on the Northwest Side, Cardinal George, 78, was the city's eighth archbishop and the first priest born in the Chicago archdiocese who rose to lead it.
     Archbishop Blase Cupich, who was the bishop of Spokane, came to Chicago in September to assume the role as George's successor, while George's title became archbishop emeritus.
     At the time of his appointment, in April, 1997, George initially set an inclusive tone.
     "The bishop is to be the source of unity in any archdiocese," he said the day he was introduced to the city. "The faith isn't liberal or conservative."

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So Marilyn Monroe is out of the question?

     I try not to burden myself with guidelines when writing this column.
     But I do have one rule: Try not to advocate the impossible. Thus no modest proposals, no utopian dreams. Live in the world of the practical.
     Wasn't always so. In the past, I've pushed quixotic quests, such as getting rid of the paper dollar, lulled into a false sense of possibility because less hidebound nations are capable of it. Great Britain has no paper pound, Canada no paper dollar, for instance. Saves them billions.
     But we can't. Americans think of themselves as dynamic and fearless — and maybe we were, once. But now we're skittish and change averse.
     That said, I see the appeal of impossible quests, such as the effort to boot Indian-slayer Andrew Jackson off the $20 bill and replace him with a woman.
     It's an odd piece of tokenism. Just as being on a U.S. postage stamp has lost its cachet — I could create legal U.S. postal stamps honoring my dog — so currency is about to be mooted by cash cards.
     But it's still significant enough for advocates to create a website and get a bill introduced into the Senate this week by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) forming an advisory committee, as only the Treasury Department could actually make such a change.
     Before we visit the website, let's ask: What woman should have the honor of debuting on U.S. currency? (A real woman, I mean, discounting all those allegorical figures of liberty and electricity and such.)
     A tough question. She'd be going head to head with Washington, Lincoln, Hamilton, Grant (the latter two don't really belong; maybe Jackson should stay and one of them go).
     Four candidates? Off the top of my head, I'd go with Emily Dickinson, Clara Barton, Amelia Earhart and Jane Addams. It isn't a diverse list — no women of color — but it's my list, and I didn't want to pander.
     Not a concern for those advocating the change. Go to their website, womenon20s.org, and you're introduced to their four finalists: Eleanor Roosevelt, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks and Wilma Mankiller.
     Heartbreaking. While energetic and independent in her own right, Eleanor Roosevelt's claim to fame is she married a man who became president. Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks — if you're looking for a black woman, they're two. But compare either, historically, to, say, Martin Luther King and I don't think I'd be alone in preferring they choose King and shelve the whole honor-a-woman idea.
     Wilma Mankiller? And she is? "First elected chief of a Native Nation." Died in 2010. An utterly unknown woman whose name expresses the fears of half of America when contemplating feminism. That's a good idea.
     Those four were voted in, supposedly, from an list of 15. Looking at that list, Rachel Carson popped out. She'd be the best call, part of a top-to-bottom currency redo focusing on the environment. (See how these impossible quests draw you in?) Or Susan B. Anthony, though she's already been on the dollar coin, and what a failure that was. Margaret Sanger? Really? The birth-control advocate? A person responsible for far more deaths, at least in the conservative view, than Andrew Jackson ever caused. Yeah, that'll go over well. We'll end up with a third of the country refusing to touch a $20 bill. I'm surprised they didn't include Emma Goldman and Madalyn Murray O'Hair (notorious red radical and fierce atheist, respectively, if those names don't ring a bell).
     Looking over their list of candidates, I caught myself thinking, "Women really haven't had much impact on U.S. history, have they?" Which can't be the intention. Women have had an impact, of course, but if we're honoring the gender, we should go back to allegory: suffragettes, pioneers, textile workers, mothers. It's so strange to push Wilma Mankiller and ignore their contributions. Then again, the whole effort is going to amount to nothing, so no need to get too worked up over which specific woman won't be honored on the twenty.

You need a friend on the inside

     You don't get a job without someone on the inside.
     In most cases, that is. You need someone both rooting for you, encouraging you, and also boosting you among the harried, hostile mucky-mucks you are trying to impress.
     At the Sun-Times, for me, that someone was Wilma Wall. A tall, calm, editorial assistant in the features department, she took my phone calls, helped me strategize, soothed my disappointments. Not that, in my early 20s, I was anything special. But Wilma was nice to everyone, and I fell into that broad category.  The features editors at the time—Carol Stoner, Susan Axelrod, and Scott Powers—were a fortress of shrugging indifference, and I can't say I remember them with a half teaspoon of affection, collectively. Wilma Wall, however, was my ladder over the rampart.
     She made me think I could actually get a job at the paper, and after two years of freelancing and constant, gerbil-on-a-wheel effort, along with a helpful union complaint filed against me claiming that I wrote so much I constituted a non-union scab, they did grudgingly hire me, 28 years ago. 
     When my mother first visited my new place of employment, to be proudly shown around the bustling newsroom on the fourth floor of 401 North Wabash, I of course introduced her to my champion, Wilma Wall.
     "We did it!" she cried, leaping up and hugging my mother, who never forgot the moment. Nor did I, which made me sad Thursday to see Maureen O'Donnell's fine obit of Wilma, and sadder still to see that she was living right in Northbrook all this time. I wish I had known. I'd have visited her, and thanked her, yet again, for all her kindness to me. 

Luck and maybe something buried led doctor through Buchenwald

The Bramsons, my grandfather's family, killed in Poland.

     Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day.*  Usually I'd let that grim holiday go unremarked upon—the Holocaust gets plenty of attention without me piling on—but the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald last week made me think of this article.
    Since it touches upon the idea of luck, I should mention the sheer coincidence that brought it about.  In 1978, the fall of my freshman year at Northwestern, I took Introduction to European Fiction with Erich Heller, perhaps the preeminent scholar of German literature in the United States. Students knew that Heller's brother Paul had been Edward R. Murrow's guide for his famous broadcast when Buchenwald was liberated. That's how Prof. Heller found out his brother had survived the war. He never spoke of these things, of course. But we all somehow knew.

     Cut to 1995. I'm at UIC Hospital, as a reporter, covering a press conference about a breakthrough in treating sickle cell anemia. The doctors are introduced, and one of them is named Paul Heller. I remember thinking that "Paul Heller" might be a common European name, like "Bill Smith" here. It might not be THAT Paul Heller. But he said a few words, in a heavy Czech accent. I went up afterward and surprised him by saying, "You're Erich Heller's brother, aren't you? You were in Buchenwald. You spoke with Edward R. Murrow." That meeting led to this story, which was frustrating in a way. Sitting in his living room, I kept trying to get at how a man survives six years in a concentration camp. He kept saying, "I was lucky." I finally realized that, whatever the full truth is, he wasn't going to tell me. So I went with lucky.

     Dr. Paul Heller is a lucky man. Sitting in the living room of his pleasant Evanston home, he recognizes that only good fortune could have gotten him through nearly six years in Nazi concentration camps, placing him—sick but alive—in Buchenwald the day it was liberated 50 years ago, on April 11, 1945.
     "Of course, I am lucky," says Heller, 80. "I was very lucky. Each day could have ended differently than it did."
     Not all the luck was good. Heller was a young doctor in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia — he received his degree just before the Germans closed down the school — with an exit visa from the Gestapo and a plane reservation to London when the Germans invaded Poland and World War II began on Sept. 1, 1939.
     He was arrested the same day, he believes, because of a political group he belonged to as a student.
     "I wasn't arrested as a Jew," he recalls. "I was arrested as an anti-Nazi."
     He was taken to Buchenwald, where he spent the next four years working in a quarry, carrying large stones in work that "seemed without purpose except to torture us."
     Again, fate came to Heller's aid.
     "I tolerated all this torturous life because I was young and relatively strong," Heller writes in an account of his life he prepared for his grandchildren.
     "But I also was lucky that I had some help. I became a friend of a German political prisoner, Max Girnd . . . he supplied me with half a loaf of bread almost every week."
     In the spring of 1943, he was transferred to the death camp at Auschwitz. Again, fate intervened.
     "I was transferred to Auschwitz to be executed and they made me a doctor," says Heller, who was put to work as a physician at the mining camp at Jaworzno.
     His written account of life in a concentration camp has a measured, almost sedate tone to it. A bout of torture becomes a "cruel interlude." A group of dying prisoners are "the most horrible sight." He retains that calm view — there is no anger or bitterness in him — which he feels was a defense mechanism.
     "This was a way of survival," he says. "I didn't look at it as a reality. There was something terribly unreal about the whole thing. I would come home from working in the stone quarry and think, `It really isn't true, what I went through today.' "
     As the war neared its end, the Germans, desperate to cover their crimes, kept trying to transfer prisoners away from the advancing enemy. Heller survived a murderous forced march from Auschwitz to another camp, Gross-Rosen. Then, severely ill from the march, Heller had the ironic good fortune to find himself shipped back to Buchenwald again.
     "I was saved in the camp hospital because I knew the people there," he says.
     Heller was still in the hospital on April 11, 1945, when Gen. George Patton's 3rd Army liberated the camp. One more stroke of luck was about to help reunite him with his surviving brother and, eventually, bring him to the United States. A day or two after liberation, the former inmates had taken over the S.S. Hospital. Heller was using its fluoroscope to screen for tuberculosis when a tall, handsome man in an American uniform — whom Heller assumed was some sort of official — stopped in and asked to be shown around Buchenwald.
     "It was a sheer accident," Heller remembers. "He was approaching the camp and stopped at the first big building."
     Heller showed the man — who turned out to be broadcaster Edward R. Murrow — around the camp, to the crematorium, the piles of shoes, of glasses, the mounds of human hair. Murrow, dazed, tried to count the bodies, "stacked up like cordwood," but gave up.
     Murrow was not only struck by the scenes of horror, but by the former station of the emaciated men who came up to greet him. He used their names — Peter Zenkl, the former mayor of Prague, Professor Charles Richet of the Sorbonne, even a man from Joliet, Walter Roeder — in his famous broadcast of April 15, one of the first reports to bring the true nightmare of the concentration camps home to a wide audience.
     "I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it, I have no words," Murrow said, toward the end of the broadcast. "If I've offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald — I'm not in the least sorry."
     Murrow also mentioned the name of his guide, Dr. Paul Heller. The broadcast was heard by Heller's brother, Erich, the noted literary scholar, and a reunion was arranged through CBS. Heller spent a year in London, then with Murrow's help, came to the United States. The two remained in contact through the years, until Murrow's death.
     Heller went on to a distinguished career in medicine. He still teaches and does research at the University of Illinois-Chicago Hospital. Now remarried after his first wife passed away, he has two grown children and three grandchildren. He declined the chance to go back to Buchenwald. "I've seen it enough," he says.
     Heller says his ordeal in Buchenwald changed him as a person and colored the rest of his life.
     "This experience was so strong it overshadowed everything," he says. "Continuous and always. Even now, 50 years after liberation, it is still there and every day I remember."
     --Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 10, 1995

* I was referring to Yom HaShoah, the Day of Remembrance in Israel, which occurs on the 27th of the Hebrew month of Nisan, falling in mid-April. International Holocaust Remembrance Day is Jan. 27.