This one's a keeper. Enjoy.

WALKING DOWN MEMORY LANE

Noor-Jehan Yoro Badat   
1,538 words
11 July 2008
The Star
e1
15
English
© Copyright 2008 Independent Newspapers (UK) Limited.  All rights reserved.   

Mention Florsheim shoes to mature men like Peter Tladi, Gift Makume and Alf Kumalo, and they’ll smile,
sigh happily and then wax lyrical about “the good old days”.

In the late 50s and 60s, the brand was among the fashion must-haves in townships across South Africa,
even if it meant aspirant owners would have to put them on lay-by, and pay instalments until the day they
could finally slip them on and hit the streets with a jaunty swagger.

“All the jazz lovers had Florsheims, and the older people used to either wear them or the Nunn Bush, the
Stetsons or the Edwin Clapp,” remembers Makume, a 59-year-old jazz aficionado.

“But it was Florsheims that were really popular because they were good-looking shoes, at the height of
fashion, and even if it rained they’d keep on shining,” says Makume, who proudly reveals that he still owns
five pairs of Florsheim shoes.

Tladi (58), the chief executive of T-Musicman, a promotions and artist management company, recalls how
on Sunday mornings he would see fellow shoe lovers sit on their doorsteps, cleaning the sides of their shoes
with a toothbrush.

It was a familiar sight to Makume as well. “With a jazz record playing in the background, and a cup of coffee
on the side, we would shine our shoes to prepare for Sunday afternoon,” he says.

Usually, Makume adds, it was to attend a jazz session or spend an afternoon with a girl at the cinema in
town. For 20c they would get a bus from Evaton to Joburg.

“I remember we would travel into town, go to the movies, check out new records at the shops, and either
look for, or buy new shoes. It was a routine,” says Tladi.

Kumalo, a well-known photographer, says most of them bought their shoes either at Levisons, or at the John
Craig stores in Joburg’s CBD. “Guys from Pretoria and Kimberley would travel all the way here to buy shoes
and clothes.”

Nicole van Doninck, marketing manager for John Craig, says their stores certainly had a significant retail
presence in those days and were the destination for Florsheim shoe shopping.

Customers were either looking to buy their first or favourite handmade Florsheim shoe that had been
imported from America, she says, as it was a traditionally well-known shoe in the black community. “Many
people walked many miles and they needed to take these steps in good shoes,” says Van Doninck.

Good shoes were an investment, agrees Kumalo, who adds that men, however, were touchy about them.
“Heaven help you if you dared to trample on a man’s shoes while you rode the train. Guys could easily get
beaten up over this.”

Tladi says that a stylish pair of shoes weren’t enough to warrant a second glance from the women. It wasn’t
a slick look without the Dobbshire pants, Ashfield shirt and an Ayers cap, he says.

“Dressed like this, you knew that you were there. Otherwise the girls wouldn’t look at you,” he says.

Kumalo says he had a tough time warding off the women when he was dressed to the nines. “The girls loved
it. I had to play dumb and pretend that I didn’t see how they looked at me,” he adds with a grin.

The emergence of this black urban trend was greatly influenced by America – its music, its movies and stars
such as Humphrey Bogart and Richard Widmark (his role in The Street with No Name was especially
memorable to township dudes), and its fashion.

But the quality of English and Italian suits was also noted by the township men who sought to be snappy
dressers, says Kumalo. The Dobbs hat, Borsalino caps, Knox hats, Stetson, Hawaiian shirts and suits
patterned in pinstripes, herringbone, chalk stripe, houndstooth and tweed were “in”.

Those who wore them were “regular guys” but it was particularly the gangsters in the townships, who
dressed well. For Kumalo, one man who stood out as a “snappy dresser” was Don Mattera, a former
gangster who turned community activist and poet.

And in Kumalo’s opinion, it was the guys from Alexandra township who were the “biggest dressers”. “You
had some of the biggest musicians coming from there like Hugh Masekela, Zakes Nkosi and Caiphus
Semenya.”

American clothes and musicians such as Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis struck a chord
with his generation, says Kumalo, lifting up their spirits from the clutches of apartheid.

“It gave us confidence and pride, and you knew that you were not just rubbish that had been run down in so
many ways,” he explains.

More importantly, black men and women identified with Black America’s struggle for equality. “We liked civil
rights activists Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and thought Stokely Carmichael was brilliantly articulate.”

Down in Durban, 73-year-old author Aziz Hassim relates how in the mid-50s and 60s, foreign sailors cast
quite an influence on their local fashion scene. Locals would buy American fashions from them at the docks.
“American jeans”, grey in colour, were popular, he says. More formal clothing like suits was also fashionable,
he adds.

“The colour of our time was navy which was worn with a shocking pink shirt. Then you were it.”

But men’s fashion, he says, seemed to change every six months. There were the mohair suits, “time to shine
fabric” suits, charcoal grey suits with stripes and the Marlboro shirts which were very popular.

“If you were one of the street honchos, then you wore the navy pants, Marlboro shirts and a navy waistcoat
which you didn’t button up. Then you literally strutted your stuff and swanked down the street,” he
reminisces.

Hassim says in his days one couldn’t buy suits off the shelf. Everything, he adds, was made by the tailors, of
which there were many on “every street corner”.

Often the tailors worked through the night because of the huge orders they received. “If you had a good
connection then you were sorted,” says Hassim.

Men were very particular about their suit trousers and would specify the number of pleats they wanted on the
sides, he says.

The tailors and movies may have had some influence on the styles of the day, says Hassim, but it was the
“street guys” who set the trends. Each gang needed to be ahead of other gangs.

“The two-tone shoes were the height of fashion and only the real wise guys, the street-wise guys, wore
them,” he adds.

“And we didn’t use the word ‘polish’,” says Hassim. “The guys would say: ‘I’ve boned my shoes, boet, till you
can see my face’.

“Face it; men are vainer than women. They just don’t admit it. There were guys who would brush their lips
lightly with lipstick to pretend they had just been kissed by a girl, and then walk down the streets to show
off,” he reveals, laughing.

There were guys who carried a special cloth in their back pockets to wipe any dust that fell on the shoes,
even if they weren’t going anywhere, says Hassim.

“Most of the time they just stood on the street corners posing in their pressed shirts and pants which had to
have a sharp crease on them or you weren’t regarded as being properly dressed.”

These old-timers would have been heartbroken if they knew how close the Florsheim Group in America
came to shutting its doors for good in 2001.

The 110-year-old brand, once a profitable family business that had been sold to outside investors, was on
the brink of bankruptcy.

But, as The New York Times reports it, the Florsheim family did a bit of “sole searching” and bought back
control of the company in 2002.

Since then the brand has resurrected itself, and has shown a strong footing in the market. A huge part of this
was moving this “aspirational shoe for the average guy” to more contemporary styles.

The Times says the family is working hard to ensure the Florsheim brand lives up to its new tagline, “The
Best ... Again!”

THE JOHN CRAIG STORY

John Craig has a rich heritage in South Africa. For decades, it was the store of choice for black men in need
of stylish clothing and footwear. In the 1950s, it was the first men’s outfitter to offer credit to customers,
enabling them to put garments or shoes aside on lay-by and gradually pay them off. Who knows how many
thousands of African men have been married in a pair of the Florsheim shoes it stocks? Today the
company is taking what has long been seen as a “black brand” and introducing it to other parts of our
multi-cultural society. Last year it began moving into areas such as Rosebank, Cresta and Greenstone, and
is opening an average of six stores a year. Now with over 45 stores nationwide, John Craig continues to
supply top-selling brands, from Pringle of Scotland, Polo and Carducci, to Levi’s, Diesel and Soviet – and
Florsheims.