When I was a kid in the 50s, we had three kinds of shoes, leather oxfords for school, tennis shoes for play, and leather sandals for the beach. Life was so simple then!
The first shoes I really remember vividly were Mary Janes, but back then we didn’t call them Mary Janes. I would have remembered because my best friend, from across the street, was named Mary Jane. We just called them Sunday shoes. Usually they were white or black patent leather and we wore them with white cotton socks, rolled down. The rule, as every kid in Brimingham knew, was no white shoes until Easter! Being Protestant, I never associated patent leather with any inappropriate reflections.
For school, we all wore brown oxfords until sometime in the upper elementary grades saddle shoes came along. I think about that same time saddle shoes were all the rage in high schools, and somehow the fad trickled down to us. Keeping them clean was a lot harder than the brown oxfords. The saddle was brown or black and sometimes the sole was a reddish rubber. The main part of the shoe was a hard to clean white!
Tennis shoes, as we called them, came in two brands, Keds and PF Flyers. Keds had the blue rectangle on the back and PF Flyers had the red ball. The Keds were considered cooler in my social set of adolescent girls, though I am not sure why. We had a choice of three colors – blue, red or white. We didn’t buy white because everyone knew white was for P.E. class and for real tennis.
I never much cared for sandals because I didn’t like the way they felt when the sand got in them. But they were, after all, required!
When I got to junior high it was a different world – shoe-wise! Saddle oxfords gave way to rah-rah shoes, which were similar to saddle oxfords but the saddle extended with a long tale to the back of the shoe. They were called rah-rah shoes because cheerleaders wore them with their uniforms. For regular kids, rah-rahs were fun because we could pick choose from saddles in different colors. I vividly remember a red pair I thought was especially “cool.”
No more Mary Janes - -now we had to wear “heels.” My first pair was red patent leather with about three inches high and instruments of the devil. I still remember the pain and the awkwardness of walking in them. After that flamboyant start, I settled on plainer pumps with lower heels.
For gym, starting in junior high and all the way through college, we had to wear white tennis shoes. They had to be inspected every Monday. Nobody liked to wash the shoes because that made they never looked right after they were washed. We resorted to coating them with white shoe polish intended for nurses’ shoes. By the end of the school year, the canvas was very stiff.
By the time I reached high school, there was only one kind of school shoe that was acceptable – Bass Weejuns. Those shoes cost about $30 and had to be special ordered about 6 weeks in advance from the ritziest department store in Birmingham. My mother reluctantly relented after I became despondent about having to wear an obvious “knock-off” brand. The optimal color was brown and the preferred style was the penny loafer (in my world it was not cool to put pennies in penny loafers).
But by the time I was a senior, it was OK to be a bit daring. I remember getting a pair of navy blue Weejuns with a pebble finish and tassels. What a fashion statement!
In high school, there was only one two kinds of acceptable shoes -- pumps and spectators. A basic wardrobe required pumps in black, blue, white and off-white. Brown was OK too if you could afford another pair. We then dressed them up with shoe clips in various styles and colors. For Easter, spectators were a good choice.
Spectators were the dress equivalent of saddle shores because they were white with colored trim. They also had small holes in them similar to a man’s wing tip shoe (BTW, my grandfather, Thomas Green Humphreys, Sr., designed the original mens’ wingtip shoes).
In college, Bass Weejuns still prevailed, as did pumps and spectators. By the time I graduated, however, other shoe style were creeping into our wardrobes. I remember a pair of navy blue shoes with sturdy low heels and big buckles. My mother, who was always every fashionable, dubbed them my “Pilgrim shoes.” I loved those shoes and wore them most days when I was a student teacher in 1968.
In 1969, the hippie movement hit my college, but I was in grad school and saw no particular need to go barefooted. We did, however, hop on the sandal bandwagon with dark brown leather thong sandals – the fancy rendition of the humble rubber flip-flop. We also took our aging Bass Weejuns and made them into strange sandals using razor blades (a summer indulgence for bored camp counselors).
When I got married and entered the professional world, it was pumps and hose in the day time and loafers at home to relax in. We were in Illinois by then and things were pretty conservative on the small, church-controlled campus where I worked. The small town where we lived did not even have a shoe store, so the simplest thing to do was wear my old shoes.
When the military sent us to California in 1971, I was cast into a strange world of synthetic leather and strange styles that my Southern sensibilities found unacceptable. The weather was beastly hot and not a good combination with synthetic leather – talk about foot odor! I finally located a shoe store where they sold shoes to little old ladies and ordered a pair of really ugly brown oxfords. At last, comfortable shoes! My mother thought they were even uglier than my Pilgrim shoes that I had only recently retired due a un-repairable broken buckle.
The entire five years I spent in California I was not happy shoe-wise. On occasional trips to Alabama I would pick up new loafers, pumps or tennis shoes. But I never fit into a world a plastic shoes, platform shoes, and peculiar sandals.
When we moved to Maryland in 1976, I quickly noticed that all of the other kindergarten moms were wearing brown leather shoes with white soles and leather laces. It was love at first sight, and within a week of arrival I had secured a pair of brown Sperry Topsiders. Soon, I bought an off-white pair for a trip to the Caribbean. I have had at least one pair in my wardrobe for the less 35 years – decades before we ever owned a sailboat.
Maryland was certainly more to my liking shoe-wise. My leather pumps, loafers and tennis shoes, along with my boat shoes, served me well for decades, with slight variations in heel design, color, and style.
Then a few years ago, something happened. My feet started to hurt – a lot! Pumps, even with the broader stacked heels that were then my preference, were intolerable. In fact, even my beloved loafers were uncomfortable.
For a trip, I ordered some really unattractive clogs with mesh tops. Within a week, I learned to love them and have ordered more colors, including a fur lined leather pair for winter. I even ordered dress versions that are really pretty strange, but are acceptable for events where I am to be on my feet for extended periods.
I still have some pumps for weddings and funerals, and I still can wear my boat shoes. My tennis shoes have morphed into athletic shoes in black for winter and white for summer.
Because I live in Maryland, I now live by the more restrictive rule on white shoes – forbidden until after Memorial Day and banned after Labor Day – except when at the airport in a flight bound for Florida (of course).
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