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Did you ever get the feeling that the world was a tuxedo and you were a pair of brown shoes?” - George Gobel
“Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees takes off his shoes.” - Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The other day I stumbled on the book James County - A Lost County of Tennessee. It’s a project of the Old James County Chapter East Tennessee Historical Society, Ooltewah, by Editor Polly W. Donnelly. Copyright 1983.
The introduction tells the story of, “The first county in the United Sates to be consolidated with another, a unique venture in local government. Organized in 1871, largely from Hamilton County and a fraction of Bradley County, the County of James forty-eight year history, plagued with political strife, ended in bankruptcy in 1919.”
This historIcal narrative details the humble beginnings of Ooltewah, Apison, Snow Hill, Harrison, Georgetown, Birchwood, Thatcher’s Switch (present day Collegedale), Long Savannah and numerous springs, churches, and named gaps in White Oak Mountain. The book chronicles the farming folks that overran the Cherokee and settled the 28 mile long, and 5 to 8 miles wide, piece of bottom land from the Georgia line at the South end, up to the Meigs County line to the North.
The book includes quite a few interesting photographs of the old county’s important and stalwart early settlers, buildings and such, but one picture of the aspiring and young students, of what appears to be an elementary school, the Georgetown School, really hooked my attention.
Titled the fall class of 1914, complete with all of the fledgling students names, the old black and white picture includes the front row of small, short and skin headed young boys. These lads appear to be somewhere between ages six and ten or so, most wearing overalls, and every last one of them is barefoot.
I remember being barefoot most of the time when school was too hot to attend, but this old photo propelled me to somehow weirdly ruminate over the multitude of footwear languishing about the closest and boot boxes on the ranch.
Now please, don’t think of this next statement as an attempt at coming off as being braggadocios, but I consider myself to be fairly well shod these days. I’ll not provide an accurate shoe count simply because I consider this accumulated wealth in serviceable footwear to be rather a bit embarrassing.
But, I will brag that I do have some favorites. With a good deal of introspection, I’m still not too sure why, but there are a few favorites.
One particular well worn pair, that I just can’t seem to throw away, are down right ugly to boot. Pardon the pun. They’re not expensive, in fact they were on sale, they’re not even leather. They’re rubber and cloth of some durable texture and muddy most of the time. Maybe it’s just as simple as something as being lazy, as they’re just quick and easy to get in and out of. They’re good to fish in.
They, this ugly set, does suffer from a significant and rather serious design flaw though. I’ve sadly come to the conclusion that these ugly shoes were somehow designed to be quickly disposable. That’s probably why they were so cheap to begin with.
Cheap footwear is a relative and highly subjective term in my book. Good footwear is never what I would consider to be a cheap commodity. Good footwear dies in my mind after the bottom of good footwear is so worn out that it exposes the toes to the hard and cold, or wet ground.
Footwear designers, now days, just don’t seem to be of the same philosophical bent. Nowhere close. This inexpensive one pair, albeit well beyond smelly and ugly, still seemingly contains maybe hundreds, maybe even thousands, of serviceable miles left on their bottoms. But, the bottoms keep coming unglued from the tops.
That’s a pretty serious design flaw when you stop and think it through. The old worn slogan ‘Safety First’ comes to mind.
In this present day age of deep-state conspiracies, fake news and political misdirection, I’ve decided to add another hideous conspiracy to long list of things that just don’t simply make a lick of sense.
Somewhere, in some remote and far off Third World Asian sweat shop, somewhere like Cambodia, Viet Nam, Sri Lanka, or some other hot and humid, rice or curry infused somewhere, there are evil little shoe factories. Shoe production facilities where scant few Asians care a hoot about yours and my hot feet,
I think this particular and devious conspiracy goes something like this:
“Hey Auk Chin! Let’s go easy on that glue you’re slapping on those cheap soles!
I know we just cut that glue with some amount of water buffalo piss, but let’s not get carried away with the stuff.
It’s cutting into our profit margin bad enough as it is.
You and I both know Auk Chin, that if we put too much of that crappy glue on these shoes we’ll never make our production quota.
And besides that, quota bonus check Auk Chin, you know good and well that we designed these shoes to only last less than a year, so we can make the new and improved model for next year.”
I figure old Auk Chin is high on glue vapors to begin with, so he dutifully does as the boss tells him to do. And old AC (Auk is Asian for duck by the way) just slathers enough glue to get the bottoms of the shoes to get them in the boxes before they start to quickly deteriorate.
Quality control and a glue that will last the lifetime of the cheapest rubber soles made, are novel concepts. Concepts that have apparently not yet reached the Third World.
So, that means that I once again have to invest heavily in 5-minute epoxy. It’s either glue ‘em up, or go to the trouble of finding where we left the trash can, and then get in the truck, and get in and out of snarled and incredibly dangerous Ooltewah traffic. Then go frantically searching for a suitable replacement. This shopping chore means spending scant disposable income for a new set of poorly designed and glued fishing shoes that are equally as cheap and easy to slip in and out of.
So, the wife (Bubbles) looks at me like I’ve suddenly gone badly stupid again, while I mix the glue, as I once again slather good two part epoxy all over the muddy, but comfortable, ugly flapping fishing soles.
She sagely offers another one of her famously blisteringly sharp opinions in the form of a series of questions;
“Why don’t you just pitch those @#$% filthy, smelly things, and you just go out and get a new pair?
How many times have you glued those nasty things back together?
I’ll bet you’ve already spent more money on 5-minute goop than any two new pairs would set you back!
Sport?
Are you listening to me Sport?”
She snaps her fingers loudly every time she cracks the word “Sport!”
I used to work for a guy that thought he was pretty smart. He was rather famous for giving away free advice. He’d say;
“What ever you do, don’t NEVER marry a women that’s smarter than you!”
He was married three times last time I checked.
Well, I did it, and I’m rather proud of it. But you know, some women just don’t quite understand, or grasp, the vast complexities and intricacies of footwear design flaws, the evils of well planned obsolescence, or vast and terrible conspiracy theories that involve the devious nature of Third World entrepreneurs who cheat with the use of footwear glue.
It’s an odd piece of a conundrum. Odd because, most women very well understand, that a good many women’s shoes, while designed make them look sexy, actually result in bringing a good amount of hurt to their pretty little feet.
If you have any doubts about this conundrum, just go on an in depth expedition in your wife’s shoe closet. If you’re really feeling froggy, or you decide to suddenly do this sort of strange inquisition after you’ve had a few too many aiming fluids, haul all, and I mean every last one, all of her vast collection of shoes, haul them out in a wheel barrow and then quiz her about why she doesn’t wear each and every shoe around the yard.
I’ll wager even money, or a ten year old bass boat, you won’t like the answer any more than you’d like feeding yourself, or sleeping on the sofa for the next few nights.
The book about old James County didn’t tell of the barefoot boys on the front row of the Georgetown School, fall class of 1914, made it through the winter of 1914 without shoes. I suspect some did. They look like a pretty rough and tumble lot. I assume that many of these barefoot boys needed a good pair of leather boots and soon lied about their age and went on to fight the Huns in the War to End All Wars.
If you ever wondered why Snow Hill, Ooltewah, or how Mahan Gap got their names, or when the first railroad, or Hernando DeSoto, invaded Indian country, then this is the book for you. Traffic wasn’t near as bad back then in James County.
“You know you’re old when someone compliments you on your alligator shoes, and you’re barefoot.” - Phyllis Diller
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