" Shoes for Kids "

Subject: Shoes- Shoes for Kids.

 

My Dad used to buy shoes for me at $5.00 to 6.00 dollars a pair. They lasted long enough to be handed down to the next in line many times. The soles were the first to show any ware and it was a hole about the size of a quarter, in the sole. A piece of cardboard would cover it for a brief time until it could be half soled by a shoe maker. This usually cost two or three dollars and lasted for years to come. The rest of the shoe remained in good shape.

 

It was always, a lace up shoe, with six or seven or more eyelets with shoe strings. Even the girls wore these shoes unless it was a Sunday dress up day. Then it was a black leather slipper with a one buckle strap. There wasn’t much too them, that is why they were only worn on Sundays.

 

As a young kid, I was always off to someplace, down the street or the other side of town, always curious as to what was going on around the town. My parents tried everything to keep me close to home. They let me go without shoes. But my feet were soon celeste hard like leather and I was off again. Mother even put small smooth stones in my shoes to slow me down, then she would tie the shoe laces in tight knots so I couldn’t undo them. But it took so long for her to get the knots untied, in the evening, so she stopped doing that.

 

The stones hurt my feet, so I would lay on my back with my feet up in the air, to get the stones to fall out. Mother always said, you have a brain, use it, so I did!

 

Today, shoes will cost any-where from eighty to a hundred and eighty dollars and upward, if one can afford them. Leather and canvas was used in all shoes back then, now they are made out of everything and some only last long enough to be worn a few times. Some have heals so high, if you fall you might break a leg. Some girls dance in them and I never understand how the can do that? They must only dance on their toes.

 

The first really good pair of shoes I ever had were the ones I received in the Navy. I have stuck with that type of shoe, most of my life. Once I had a pair of wooden shoes, like the Dutch people wore. I wore them in water when collecting pretty stones from creeks and one floated away never to be seen again. The other shoe was placed on a mantle, over the fire place, as a decoration, for years to come. Where ever it is now, I have no idea!

 

Shoes come and shoes go, while the sales people enjoy the profits, But Kids are around forever and some never do grow up to be  responsible adults. Like myself, I am somewhere between eighty and one hundred and I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up!

 

By; Ben R . 

June 19, 2014