Years before over-$100-a-pair Adidas, Pumas and Reeboks came onto the sports-shoe market, your basic $3, kicking-around, kids play-shoe was made of canvas and rubber. I started conducting canvas shoe destruction tests at an early age when nylon-and-leather "running shoes" with their medically correct arch supports and Velcro closure systems were still 40 years in the future.
We always called 'em sneakers or tennis shoes for some unknown reason - not that any of us actually played tennis in them or even knew how. I guess what the shoes really were was more of a basketball shoe - but "tennies" is what they were commonly known as.
"Mom, can I get a new pair of tennies?" I begged one spring day long ago after I'd come home from school.
"I just bought you a new pair last September," she answered, perplexed, "right before you started school and it was too cold to wear them all winter. Are you sure you need a new pair? ... Have you been dragging them on the pavement when you're on your bike?" she quizzed.
"Not me...."
We used to wear out our tennies' soles when we'd be out riding our bicycles in the dirt, and we'd put out a foot and slide our bikes through the turn just like we'd seen in pictures of dirt-track motorcycle racers. We just never realized that the motorcycle racers were wearing steel soles strapped to the bottoms of their boots.
You could slide a tennie on dirt, but if you tried to put any weight on an outstretched tennie on pavement, it would grab hold, and you were asking for a painful dump. I had the skinned knees to prove I'd tried that a few times, too.
Mom and I drove down to the shoe store and went inside. Back then, choosing new sneakers seemed to be a series of two choices: black or white? low-tops or high-tops? and U.S. Keds or P.F. Flyers?
"Well - what do you what?" Mom asked.
"Keds, black high-tops," I quickly answered.
The shoe salesman measured my foot with his sliding wooden scale and then went off to get the shoes.
"Now these are the last pair you're getting for a while," Mom warned, "so you'd better not let me catch you dragging them on the ground while you're out riding your bike." I had the feeling that we hadn't been fooling her one bit.
"How's that?" asked the salesman as he laced one tennie up. "Why don't you walk around a little bit with it on?"
"I want to look at them through the machine," I answered. I put on the other sneaker and walked over to the fluoroscope that every shoe store had during the early '50s. I put my feet in the slot at the bottom of the big wooden box, and I stood and peered into the viewing port on my side. I could faintly see the outline of my new shoes and the bones of my feet within them. I wiggled my toes; this was the neatest thing about getting new shoes - looking through the machine.
I remember lying in bed that night - with my new tennies clear across the room - and still smelling their fresh rubber. That smell would last about a week, only to be replaced by a different odor before Mom would throw them in the washer. They'd clunk around in there for about a half-hour and then emerge fresh. Try that with your new Reeboks.
The day after I got my new tennies, I was the center of attention at school in my new black high-tops. At recess I felt that I could not only run faster, but that I could stop on a dime and give you nine cents change. I was cool - period.
Over the years, new tennies seem to have lost some of their ritualistic charm with me. Oh, there was a time, during my "Surfer" period, when you just had to have blue Topsiders. Then a year later black low-tops were the thing to have - but only if they were "Smileys" and had a blue, U-shaped line around the toe. New tennies gradually lost their charm and got to the point where they were just replacements for the old worn-out pair.
Last month, though, I spotted a pair of red high-tops that sported a yellow flame job across the toes that would make custom car painter "Big Daddy" Roth proud. You know I had to buy them. We be cool, daddy-o.
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