But when Humphrey wants to enjoy the music of “jokes and lies with old friends down to the mailman,” as he puts it, he heads to 10 N. Light Street and Pritchet’s Shoe Service.
There he kicks back with his friend and sometimes drummer or guitar player, Cliff Borden – along with whoever else comes in the door.
In addition to loving Borden “like a brother,” Humphrey says he is grateful to him for keeping a tradition alive about an embedded sense of community that both associate with the Pritchet’s of their childhoods.
“My grandpa used to take me in Mr. Pritchet’s when I was a little boy,” said Humphrey. “Black and white, young and old, a lot of people used to go to Mr. Pritchet.”
Enough of that same quality survives in the Pritchet’s Borden runs today that Humphrey thinks of it as the perfect setting for a local Barber Shop-like movie.
As the last old-school shoe repair shop in town, “Sole Survivor” might be a working title. And it’s hard to think of a better opening scene than Borden unlocking the door for a customer who has been waiting a few minutes and saying what he did in our interview: that the hours posted by the door are “suggested hours.”
Then comes the confession that has to make you smile: “I don’t think I’ve been on time for 10 years.”
His real-life customers nonetheless know they can depend on him not only for repairs but greetings of a 74-year-old who’s grateful to those of all races, young and old, who have stopped in over the last nearly 40 years.
Credit: Bill Lackey
Credit: Bill Lackey
One of their own
Borden grew up one of four boys and two girls in a house on Sherman Avenue just west of the bridge over Buck Creek. The area was known as “The Bottoms” and decades earlier as “The Black Bottoms” for the race of most of the Borden neighbors.
In the days before the Clarence J. Brown Dam and Reservoir, Buck Creek periodically flooded the area, providing Borden with a lasting memory of sitting in his father’s boat and using a net to land goods and plastic bags of puffed wheat that had floated out of the nearby A&P grocery.
His father was a mechanic at Baker & Ice Chrysler at Yellow Springs and Columbia Streets, his mother head of housekeepers at the IOOF Home.
But it was his grandmother who connected him with the first people in the wider world for whom he will always be grateful. Jules and Jean Greenebaum, a white couple who owned the downtown Tot Shop, liked both their housekeeper’s grandson and the care he took mowing their law. So, “one day,” Borden says, “they invited me inside and asked if I’d like to work downtown.”
With his pipe never far off and patience as long as his wife’s could be short, Mr. Greenebaum “showed me about everything” in the store,” Borden says, starting when he was 13.
“They both were just great,” he adds. “They had two kids, and they treated me like one of their own.”
Credit: Bill Lackey
Credit: Bill Lackey
A foggy history
Graduating from North High School in 1969, Borden moved on to a machinist’s job at Robbins & Myers Crain Hoist on Lagonda Avenue. “I also did plating, steel room, stock room, other jobs like that. It paid good,” he said, but “at times I liked it and at times I didn’t.”
Borden’s own mind is in a fog over whether he took a part-time work at the original Pritchet’s at Main Street and Western Avenue mostly for the extra money. His best friend Mike Richardson, who was best man at the wedding, is strongly of the opinion that Borden was there to be near James Allen and Evelyn Pritchet’s lovely daughter, Jennifer.
Richardson nonetheless remembers being struck at how firmly Borden embraced the work.
“Cliff stayed every day after work and Saturday. It was just amazing.”
And when Richardson and others dropped by the shop, “we would always be talking to the back of his head” or to affable Mr. Pritchet.
Credit: Bill Lackey
Credit: Bill Lackey
Borden remembers not wanting to “break my stride” at the work bench but says at the time he didn’t himself understand his attraction to the work. “I wasn’t even thinking about being a cobbler, and I didn’t know when Mr. Pritchet was going to retire.”
Whatever drew him in, “I took it real serious,” he said, and remembers shifting into learning mode.
“The main thing, for me is, you got to pay attention and take notes …. I still got my old notes (here) somewhere.”
His personal notes of the time would indicate that he took to the Pritchet’s as he had to the Greenebaums, and they to him. And they, in turn, introduced him to the tight-knit brotherhood that would also treat him as one of their own.
The Brotherhood of the ‘Garbage’
“You gotta understand something about people in the shoe repair business back in the 60s, 70s and 80s,” said Don Amicon, who got into it in work in that era.
“First, of all, the Greeks Italians kind of got along because a lot of them worked for each other when they first came over.”
And because there was plenty of work to go around, he said.
“It wasn’t like a competition, Amicon said. “It was just everyone could do the job. Because everybody went through the same garbage to learn it.” He said they respected and helped one another in the way farmers did in the time when threshing machines traveled from place to place at harvest time. “I show up in the business, and a little while later, Cliff shows up.”
Like Italian, Greeks and Germans, “Blacks don’t scare me,” Amicon said.” They don’t upset me, they’re just people.”
Borden picks up the story after saying Amicon had just dropped by the day before.
“I was having trouble with a machine, the sole stitcher, and he knew all about it. He knew how to fix all the machines, and I didn’t.”
Back to Amicon: “Well, I’m not doing anything,” he said, so he fixes it, and the brotherhood continues.
The bottom line for Borden is this: When a satisfied customer praises his work, “I get put in a category with those shoe repairmen who were real good,” Borden said.
That shoe fits, and he’s proud to wear it.
Last of the Mohicans
“In the 1960s, there was a thing called Shoe Service Magazine,” Amicon said.
It covered the new machinery, the products and services of the shoe repair business.
And it reported, that back then, “If you could service (a customer base of) 10,000 people you could make a decent living.”
By the mid ‘80s, when Borden married into the business, the coming of flip-flops and tennis shoes had made inroads that in time a larger population was required “to get the same amount of fixable shoes as you’d get in 10,000.”
Over that time, others retired and went out of business, leaving Borden as the sole survivor. Or, as he puts it, “the Last of the Mohicans.”
He’s seen a lot of loss and decline and misses the salesmen who for a long time came by with their samples but eventually made phone calls.
“My salesman (Bob Merle) just died a few weeks ago,” he said. And on the phone with Ed, “the new guy,” Borden recently learned of a milestone in shoe repair history: Kiwi Company’s Cat’s Paw heels that have been around since 1904 – so, during his entire career – have used up all nine of their lives.
Credit: Bill Lackey
Credit: Bill Lackey
Hold the phone
Borden himself is still going and has no immediate plans to stop.
“You’ve got to have something to do, or you’ll die.”
He still gets satisfaction from replacing broken high heels, repairing purses and others leather goods brought to him, and now does 200 or more build-ups of soles each year for customers whose leg lengths are altered by hip or knee replacements.
Borden’s personal and family history are also in evidence around the shop, preserved in fading photos of children on the walls and counters. Though he and Jennifer divorced after 40 years of marriage, “she’s cool,” he said. He credits her with being a good wife and mother and confesses “I was just a little different sometimes.”
Jennifer said when her ex turned 75 last month “I called him, and we talked for three hours. There’s been times we’ve talked for seven.”
That testimony establishes that Cliff Borden’s “suggested hours” at Pritchet’s can be extended indefinitely.
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