By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, December 5, 1942.
“AAWW,” said Jimmie Frise. “ker-CHOW!”
“Where did you get the cold?” I inquired.
“This is a war effort cold,” confided Jim thickly. “Instead of riding to work in my own car, I ride in the street car. I got soaked yesterday in the rain. And then I inhaled a nice, fat germ from somebody coughing down my neck. And besides, my clothes are half cotton now, instead of all wool. And furthermore, my shoes are wearing out.”
“Jim,” I asserted, “the biggest part of the war effort right now, at this time of year, is to guard against sickness and colds. Anybody who gets a bad cold these days is a public enemy, so long as he mingles around with the public, following his own, selfish interests. One careless person in at street car or even behind a counter or in a factory can infect a dozen before the day is done. And each one passes it on, until we’ve got, say, one thousand war workers laid up.”
“Well, is it my fault,” demanded Jimmie, “that somebody coughed in my face?”
“No, but it was your fault that you got your clothes wet, and your feet soaked,” I informed him sternly. “The Germans would be mighty happy if they could make a poison gas attack on a city and put one thousand workers out of business for a few days.”
“Oh, so I’m a poison gas attack, am I?” snorted Jim.
“A German agent,” I stated, “could do no better work than go and catch himself a swell juicy cold and then spend the day going coughing around the big department stores and riding up and down the elevators of the large skyscrapers, coughing and sneezing and spraying poison far and wide.”
“So I’m a German agent?” gritted Jim, miserably, blowing his nose and wiping his eyes.
“All I say is,” I advised, “at this time of year, you should get up in the morning in time to look out and see what the weather is like. And dress yourself accordingly. Most people just get up and dress in a sort of blind and woebegone stupor; and not until they reach the front door, on their hurried way to catch the street car, do they see what sort of a day it is.”
“I get up earlier than you do,” snuffled Jim.
“But I haven’t a cold,” I enunciated. “No matter how wet the day, if you keep your clothes from getting damp and your feet from getting wet, you will not catch a cold. And if you do get your clothes damp and your feet wet, don’t let any silly formality prevent you from drying your clothes and taking off your wet shoes. As a matter of fact, I think everybody ought to have a spare pair of light shoes or slippers at his place of work, to change into on wet days.”
“And a pair of dry socks,” added Jim.
“We’ve Been Sheltered”
“And no matter how shabby the raincoat,” I declared, “wear the raincoat. Or else a good big thick overcoat that can take the wet. An awful lot of people who have been sheltered for years by driving in their private motor cars are going to get wet and be exposed to cold germs now, in street cars and buses.”
“That’s my case, exactly,” agreed Jim, sadly, through his handkerchief. “We’ve been sheltered. Now we are exposed.”
“But the germs would never get you,” I asserted, “if you didn’t invite them. Germs are everywhere. Your throat and nose are full of them all the time. But they’re on the surface. They can’t get in. They can’t penetrate into your healthy tissue.”
“How does getting my feet wet let them in?” inquired Jim wetly. “Do they penetrate through my toes?”
“No,” I explained, having been reading all about it in an almanack the other day in a flour and feed store where I was trying to get some dog biscuits. “When you get your feet wet, your feet get cold. And the rest of your system starts trying to step up the heat so that the blood will go down and warm up your feet, which are sending out distress signals.”
“How does your system step up the heat?” demanded Jim.
“By staging a small fever,” I elucidated. “And at the same time, due to the cold, your skin is constricting a little bit, which clogs up the blood vessels in your nose, amongst other things. So you start sneezing, to loosen up the constriction. And the sneezing and the small fever, inflames the tissues of your nose and throat. And wham, the germs, that a moment ago were sitting all frustrated on the surface, promptly dig down into the inflamed and swollen tissues.
“That’s enough,” said Jim, “that’s enough! I can actually feel the little devils burrowing in my nose. Aawwww-ker CHOW!”
And I ducked smartly to one side to avoid the poison gas spray.
“First of all,” I concluded, “if you can’t get rubbers, wear good stout shoes. This is no time to consider style, Wear the toughest, roughest boots you’ve got. And buy some light penetrating shoe oil and take a little paint brush and paint the bottom of the soles liberally, and all around the crack where the sole joins the uppers.”
“It’s no use oiling my shoes now,” wheezed Jim. “I’ve got the cold.”
“This is the time,” I assured him, “so you won’t get wet feet again and help the cold hang on another week. Let’s see your shoes.”
Jim held his foot up.
“Why,” I protested, “Jim, you ought to be ashamed to wear light shoes like this in December. In the first place, the wet and rain and spray of walking can get on your ankles and do just as much damage as if the wet soaked through the soles. And besides, these soles are thin enough for a hot summer day.”
“I can’t afford new shoes,” said Jim. “I’m on a war budget.”
“Get them half soled,” I advised. “The next time you’re down town, go into one of those while-you-wait, shoe repair shops and get new soles.”
“I could wear goloshes,” figured Jimmie, “but the trouble with goloshes is they are so much trouble. I wear them down in the morning. Then, at noon, I look out and see it is a fine day, and instead of going to all the nuisance of putting on my goloshes, I figure it is only a block or so to the restaurant, so I go without them. And before I have gone 50 yards, I can feel the cold around my ankles.”
“And a slight tickling sensation in your nose?” I inquired alertly.
“Now that you mention it, yes,” said Jim. “It all seems to fit the picture.”
“Out in the country, on the farm,” I submitted, “they don’t have half the colds we have in towns and cities, although they walk around all day in wet and slush and mud. But they wear good dry footwear. And you will always see dry socks hanging on the clothes line in the farm kitchen.”
“In December,” summed up Jimmie, “we all ought to carry a spare pair of socks in our pocket.”
“It would be a swell idea,” I agreed. “My grandfather always…”
And then I stopped.
“What about your grandfather?” inquired Jim heavily.
“Jim,” I exclaimed. “Down cellar! In the old tool chest! A complete shoe repair outfit. I haven’t looked at it for years. Come on. Let’s go down cellar.”
And I led Jim down to the room beyond the furnace cellar where, in a dusty and forgotten corner, beyond even the farthest groping of family salvage hunters, a big old red tool chest that belonged to my grandfather and which my father in turn had kept for 30 years down in the dustiest and most forgotten corner of his cellar, reposed as forgotten as if it were a part of the foundations.
“I haven’t opened this chest,” I cried, as we lifted off the various old table leaves, baby bassinets and ironing boards, “for 20 years.”
“Why, it may be a regular mine of tools and stuff,” said Jim eagerly.
But of course, it wasn’t. My grandfather had been the kind of man who loved tools. He had all the essential ones, when this chest was new. But my father had taken out the hammers and the saws. And a couple of generations of exploring boys had extracted the chisels and braces and bits and augers.
Grandfather’s Tool Chest
When I lifted the lid, it was a ghostly spectacle of empty tool racks and empty sockets and brackets that met our eyes. Only a few old rusty cold chisels, a few misshapen and antique cardboard boxes of nails and screws were scattered over the bottom. But still fair and hard and bold was the shoemaker’s last1, the iron foot on which the cobbler sets the shoe for its repairs. A brown paper parcel contained a leather cobbler’s apron, stiff as metal with age. And when Jimmie and I dragged the chest over under the furnace room light, we saw that there was a small package tied, with such brown string as they used in the gay nineties, to the shank of the last. And when I opened it, it was full of small shoemaker’s nails, a brittle coil of shoemaker’s thread and a tiny bundle of bristles which the shoemaker rolls with wax into the end of his thread. This bristle he uses like a needle, to thread the waxed end through his awl holes in the sole of the shoe.
“My grandfather,” I said, “would not think of taking a pair of shoes to the cobbler. Fifty years ago, a man was a fairly useful creature.”
“If I remember right,” said Jim, “a shoemaker’s last, like this, used to be as common an item in people’s cellars as a wash boiler. A man was not considered to be a man, unless he could repair the family’s shoes as readily as the wife could darn the socks, sew on buttons and mend the children’s clothes.”
“It was in my father’s time.” I said, exploring the little package further and finding a small round ball, about the size of a walnut, black as pitch, which I knew to be the cobbler’s wax, “that family shoe repairing started to go out of fashion. I should say about the year 1900 was the period, in cities and towns, anyway, when men started to decay.”
“Women can still darn and knit and mend,” said Jimmie, taking the cobbler’s wax and warming it in his hands, “Women can still make pickles and preserve fruit. Women, if the worst came to the worst, could this very day, knit us our underwear. tailor us our shirts, even cut and sew fairly presentable suits of clothes. But what can we men do?”
“We men,” I confessed, “are the softies. It is we who have surrendered to the modern age. Each of us can do only one thing. We have learned to be bookkeepers, salesmen, mechanics, truck drivers. And if we are asked to do anything different, we form a union to prevent it.”
Jimmie held out his hand and revealed the little black ball of cobbler’s wax already starting to soften.
I kneaded the black waxed thread. It began to soften.
“Jim,” I said, “if we only had a pair of soles! I’d cobble your shoes, by golly.”
Jim leaned down in the chest and slithered the dusty iron relics and perishing cardboard boxes about. And then with a sudden yell, rose up with a shoe sole in his grasp.
It was gray and dusty and hard as a board with age. But it was a shoe sole. And in another moment, I, exploring the chest, found two more. All three were of the same size, much too large for Jimmie’s shoes.
“But that is how the cobbler does,” I explained. “He sews the sole on and then trims it with a knife to the correct size.”
Putting On a New Sole
And down we both bent to explore for the cobbler’s knife and awls.
“Here it is,” I announced surely, holding up the old curved knife.
“That’s not a cobbler’s knife,” declared Jim. “That’s a skinning knife. A cobbler’s knife cuts with the inside of the curve. That’s sharp on the outside of the curve.”
“Would my grandfather,” I inquired, “have a skinning knife? It stands to reason, Jim, that this knife belongs with the shoemaker’s last, the leather and the rest of it.”
So we selected a good spot under the light. And there I set up the cobbler’s shop. With neatsfoot oil2 I annointed the leather soles, and such is the deep and true character of leather that in a few moments of bending and rubbing, the neatsfoot penetrated and the life came back into that ancient hide until it might have been a sole fresh bought from the store.
And a little more neatsfoot on the creases of the cobbler’s apron loosened up its antique brittleness so that I could fit it on very comfortably. Since I could find no awls, we decided not to sew the soles on Jim’s shoes, but use the nails we found tied in the little package.
“After all,” I pointed out, as Jimmie surrendered his first shoe to me, “sewing is an art and must be learned. But driving a nail comes as natural as throwing a stone.”
“The cobbler,” instructed Jimmie, “always secures the sole in position with a few nails first. Then he proceeds to nail it all around, regular.”
“And with a little shifting and sliding, I got the sole in a promising position and drove the first nail.
“The cobbler,” said Jim, “carries the nails in his mouth.”
“At least,” I remarked,” we have more sanitary ideas nowadays, even if we men have lost our handicraft.”
The first nail missed the edge of Jim’s old sole. The second was too far inland. But at the third try, I got the nail just about a third of an inch from the edge of the shoe. At four more points. I inserted nails, making sure that the sole was evenly and symmetrically placed in position.
Then it was a simple matter to proceed, in an artistically curved line, all around the sole, spacing the nails just about as they were spaced in our own shoes. The wide new sole prevents you from seeing underneath, when the shoe is on the last. So you have to do it by feel.
The first 10 nails gradually worked further and further in on the sole, until, near the toe, I found my row of nails was a good inch and a half away from the edge of Jimmie’s shoe.
So I used a screwdriver and pried it all loose and proceeded to withdraw the nails with a pair of pliers.
“Look,” said Jimmie, “how about practising on an old shoe first? I can wait. Besides it’s not too good for my cold to be down here…”
Cobblers are Silent
But cobblers are silent and intent men. I paid no attention, but leaned closer to my work, wrapped my legs around the last stand, and having the holes of the nails of my first try to guide me, I laid a new course of nails along the sole, following much nearer the edge of Jim’s shoe, so that as I rounded the toe, I was within a quarter inch of the edge. Jim was sitting forward anxiously.
“That row of nails looks like a worm track,” he remarked.
“They won’t show,” I assured him shortly. Cobblers don’t talk much. “You can’t see the nails in a shoe’s sole.”
Thus I drew the curve around the toe, and ran a fairly true course down the outside of the sole, only occasionally changing direction a little, and now and then putting in two nails, side by side, in case of doubt.
And with a final bang and tap, I finished the little space across against the heel.
“What’s the matter, with that?” I inquired triumphantly, holding the shoe up with the new sole, projecting, of course, all around, but clinging snugly and stoutly to Jim’s shoe.
“Now comes the ticklish part,” said Jim. “Cut very gently. Take it off in little slices.”
“I’ve watched shoemakers,” I said, briefly.
It is funny how uncommunicative cobbling makes you.
With the neatly curved knife, I started to slice, holding the shoe against me and drawing with the knife as I had seen cobblers do.
“Eeeeaaaassyyy,” warned Jimmie, as I started around the curve.
But the neatsfoot had perhaps not penetrated as deeply as I had thought. The knife made a quick jump. And sliced a large gash in the toe.
“Ruined!” yelled Jimmie, snatching it from me.
So I lent him a pair of goloshes to wear home.
And worst of all, as I let Jim out the front door, I was seized by a large, violent sneeze. “Now you’ve done it,” I accused.
But he just pulled the door shut in my face and stamped down my steps in my goloshes.
Editor’s Notes: The title “Cobbler, Stick to Your Last”, is a term that that means people should focus on what they know and not try to do things they are not familiar with.
- Details on the cobbler’s last is here. ↩︎
- Neatsfoot oil is a yellow oil rendered and purified from the shin bones and feet (but not the hooves) of cattle. “Neat” in the oil’s name comes from an Old English word for cattle. Neatsfoot oil is used as a conditioning, softening and preservative agent for leather. ↩︎
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