The Rejected Shoes

The Rejected Shoes

When I was twelve years old, my Aunt Betty gave me a formal framed portrait of my father, taken by Bachrach Studios in Boston about 1940.  I have kept it on my bureau ever since.  In this photo, my father looks young and sultry, as I had never seen him look before.  I am the fifth child, born when he was nearly forty years old.  I remember him with wrinkles, so many wrinkles that he had to stretch the skin on his face to shave every morning.

One day when he was having coffee at my house, I brought out the photo to show him.  He was in his late eighties by this time.  He told me the photographer was looking for business and hoping for MIT students to order and pay for lots of prints.  This was my father’s only copy.  It was free.  He sent it home to his mother in Missouri.  He said the photographer asked him to lower his eyelids, which successfully gave the look of ‘bedroom eyes’.

Then my old wrinkled father told me a story:  He had to work whenever he could.  He took work on contract with New England Candy Company, next door to MIT, where they wanted the wafers to dry more quickly.  From his description, it sounded like he invented the microwave oven. 

However, the real story here is the consulting work he took in the shoe factory to improve the operation of equipment.  First, the owner showed him the room where the men worked making the soles.  Then he brought my father to the floor where the women worked on the uppers.  My father told me the room became very quiet and then a low but very audible whistle of admiration came from the factory women for a rare handsome and observant young man on the factory floor.

My father consulted with the shoe factory most of that summer.  At the end of the summer, the factory owner asked him what size shoes he wore.  “Eleven B.”, he told him. At this answer, the owner brought out a brand new pair of handmade shoes, made for and rejected by the bishop of Michigan.  The leather and workmanship were exquisite. 

The shoes were his parting gift to my father.  How my father loved those shoes!  Then he said, the bishop of Michigan was an antiSemitic radio host who did not deserve those shoes.