Paul Stachelek

Nick Necoechea (right). "Kind of like a housewife in her house is what I am here, checking to see that all the shoes are out, properly presented."

Paul Stachelek

So who’s this fellow, holding your foot? You never stop to wonder about him (l didn't), when you look in through a shoe store’s windows and see him bent humbly, penitently, over a customer’s foot. Or if you walk into the store, you are (I certainly am) of course fixed on finding, perhaps, that so-soft navy blue pump with strap interest, or brute tough brogan, and you never guess at or even consider (it's not your job) the man (or woman) who holds your warm, stockinged or socked foot, your toes wriggling pleasurably, ooooh, in release from the hot pocket of shoe you’ve sloughed off. The same wee pudgy toes your mama played little piggy come to market with, he or she's cradling in a cool hand while you're imagining you (that's your job), dreaming ahead to a future with your feet in the new shoe.

"Shoe people are always commission. That’s your paycheck. If I sell the shoe, I walk away with the two dollars in my paycheck. If you were paid a flat $200 a week and that's it, you couldn't care less."

Paul Stachelek

Nick Necoechea, a big man, built big, vigorous hair springing its black curls around his head, this morning wears gray tie, gray suit, blue-gray shirt, gray above-the-ankle boots raised on an inch and a half of heel. "These boots," he laughs, "by the end of the day will be hurting me."

Why does he wear them?

"Style."

Nick has been in Streicher’s, in the Chula Vista shopping center, since the store opened in November 1962. "I love it," he says, looking out onto pale light filtering in onto the walkways circling through the center, at hurrying clerks and strolling early shoppers sipping coffee from polystyrene cups. "I love it because of the windows. I'd go crazy in a little shop. When I started working for Streicher’s, I was assigned downtown. They had what they called the 'Upstairs on Fifth Avenue,' and oh my, you hardly ever saw daylight except in the summer. You knew it was raining only because you could hear the water hitting the roof. I hated that place. So when they asked me to come over here, it was like going to paradise."

Streicher’s is a family store, selling men's, women’s, children's shoes. Nick has now, as customers, people he fitted for shoes when they were babies. "They have that much confidence in me."

George Hickox: "The heavy brogue, for instance. It was $32.95 30 years ago, it's up to $175 now."

Paul Stachelek

He's manager, the boss. A dozen employees work under him in his kingdom of shoes — Naturalizers, Cobbie, Florsheim, Clarks, Rockport, SAS, Dexter, Sperry Top-Siders, Hush Puppies, RJ Colt, Trotter, Revelations, Cherokee, Cobbie Cuddlers.

Nick stands at the counter, an island that stretches several feet along the store's west side. Behind the counter is the door that opens onto the stockroom, where some 14,000 pairs of shoes, in boxes, line shelves upstairs and down. Nick is re-lacing a Florsheim wingtip, whose leathery fragrance crosses under my nose. "Customers come in and unlace ’em and we have to re-lace ’em." He whisks the shoe back snug next its mate. "And customers pick them up from there and throw them over there and you have to put them back again. This is not the kind of job that you say to yourself, 'Nothing to do right now, so I'll just lay off and do nothing.' "

Nick's humming. "Kind of like a housewife in her house is what I am here, checking to see that all the shoes are out, properly presented." He runs a long finger over glass shelving on which sit a row of women’s high heels. "It gets dirty in here, dusty, with all the doors open. This was dusted yesterday, I know that, and it’s already got dust on top of it.”

At the store’s other end, a slender, brown-haired, delicately built man arranges shoes. Nick nods toward him. George Hickox he is, the assistant manager, here with Nick for 17 years. “Everybody has his own chores. They know what to do in the morning or in the afternoon when they come in. Once in a while you have to get a little stick and poke them.”

Ten o’clock. Ten, eleven women mill outside the Broadway. Nick opens both doors, north and south, stands, hands on hips of his sunlit gray suit, breathes in, breathes out. Paradise.

The day’s first customers — a gorgeous woman in her late 30s, resplendent in a black-and-white checked sun dress that leaves bare her tanned shoulders, the woman’s chubby-cheeked toddler son, face scrubbed bright, and gray-haired trim-figured mother — enter the store. Nick, speaking Spanish, hello-hellos the trio. The beauty — her lips glistening red and her teeth white — introduces her mother, visiting from Ecuador, says that her mother is attracted by navy-and-white low-heeled spectator shoes she had seen through the window.

Nick seats the trio in chairs beneath the south windows, pulls up and straddles the fitting stool. All the while, as he gently removes the mother's black pump (its sole scuffed and worn), treating the stockinged foot as reverently as if it were a baby Jesus he was lifting from its golden straw in the creche, Nick is charmingly talking, talking. He places her foot on the Branick Device (a Mr. Park and a Mr. Branick, specialists in fitting problem feet, invented this measuring device early in this century in Syracuse, New York). “Ah, a small foot, a 5 1/2.”

While Nick in the stockroom gathers shoes for the mother to try on, the young boy turns his mouth up toward his mother’s ear (from which a delicately set diamond dangles), asks in a stage whisper. "Is Nick the doctor?"

“No, no,” the mother says, "he’s Nick. He’s the shoe man.”

Nick carries four shoe boxes, the boxes stacked one atop the other on his upraised, flattened-out right palm in the way that a flamboyant waiter bears his tray aloft. He sets the boxes down next him, takes out from pale lavender tissue one of the navy blue-and-white spectator pumps.

Like her bare-shouldered daughter, the mother has a lissome elegance, an awareness of her body. She had been a very pretty woman. She stands, walks across the dark mauve carpet to a full-length mirror mounted on the wall. She turns her right foot in toward her left ankle, studies the reflected foot. Nick watches the mother, the daughter, the mother, the mirror. The daughter's eyes shift from her mother's feet to the mirror, in which her mother’s feet can be seen.

The mother's mouth purses. She points her right foot forward, as a dancer will, tilts her head, turns the left foot in toward the right ankle. A tiny frown has begun to grow between her eyebrows. She addresses Nick, says that the shoes do not seem to fit as she'd hoped they would, they feel too tight. And they look, she says, so heavy on her foot. The heel, she thinks, is too low.

Nick makes sympathetic noises. His eyes fall to the woman's discarded pumps, laying on their sides, run-over heel to run-over heel, on the carpet. Idly, he leans over, straightens them.

The daughter suggests her mother try a half-size larger. No, no, no says the mother, dropping down wearily in her chair, looking now more elderly by ten years than she had when she’d walked toward the mirror. Nick swivels forward on the fitting stool, lovingly removes the shoes from the woman’s feet, and slips her own shoes back on for her. “We will be back,” the daughter says.

Nick accompanies the trio to the north door, strolls back then to stand behind the counter. “She wasn’t really that interested. It was her daughter who was interested in her having the shoe. The mother, she comes from what they call the old school: 'You buy one pair of shoes and you wear those until they are worn and only then you are ready to buy another pair.'

"I know the family. I’ve sold her, the daughter, a lot of shoes over the years. Her husband, I know him better. He buys even more shoes than she does. And the mother, before she goes back, she will eventually come back and buy a pair of shoes.”

Nick shrugs when I ask how he knows the mother eventually will buy shoes. "You just know those things."

He repacks the navy-and-white spectators in their box. “We call the shoes that are left out after a customer tries them on the ‘drags.’ That's a term shoe people have used for a long time."

“Maybe,” says George, who adjusts a mock crocodile skimmer to stand neatly next its partner. “because it’s a drag to do, putting back shoes.”

Looking at a foot, does Nick know what shoe will fit or not fit that foot? "Not even after all these years. If you see someone with a big bunion, or a big hammertoe, I can tell you right away, 'This little low vamp, no way you can get all that foot in there’ But generally, no."

Nick and George say that in the time they've sold shoes, their customers have become more conscious of comfort. "People,” Nick says, "anymore don’t want the suffering they had to go through with new shoes. In the old days, people were buying somebody else's shoes. And there are still a few stubborn ones who have to have their toes jam into the front of their shoes. But generally people are more health conscious than they used to be, and the feet are number one." Nick sighs, “If your feet hurt, you ache all over."

George agrees, adds, in the tone one takes when uttering gospel: "Actually. I would have to say more than half of what is wrong with your body is what is wrong with your teeth or your feet. So, take care of your feet and your teeth and you can eat what you want and walk where you want."

What do they do if a customer insists on buying a shoe that's too small? Nick answers. "What I do, I say, 'That’s your shoe, you buy it that way, don’t bring it back to me and tell me it hurts.’ And they don't. And they often come back and buy another pair. Truth has a lot to do with it when you are selling a shoe. If it doesn’t fit you. it doesn’t fit you.

“You know," Nick says, “which salesmen are truthful and which try to sell just to sell. I don’t like that. You’d be surprised how you can sell a shoe that doesn’t fit. ’It stretches,' you can tell them. Of course it will stretch, it has to stretch, you put pressure on it and it expands. And then it gets out of shape. But the shoe should be comfortable from the beginning.

" 'The customer is always right?’ I disagree. Some people like to take advantage of the retail business, especially if you are lenient. They will come and say, 'I have a pair of shoes that hurt.’ They come in with a little chip on their shoulder. I have a short fuse, a very short fuse, and if customers come in with the attitude that it’s my fault, it's my problem, because I sold the shoe to them, then I get a little huffy, which is bad. Especially in retail business. But I don’t blame them, because some salesmen do take advantage of customers."

Do people steal shoes?

Nick shrugs. “We used to have a lot of shoplifting. Not as much now. Very seldom in fact. Shoplifting with shoes, the most common method is to be trying on shoes and say to the salesman, 'This feels a little tight. Can you get me a bigger one?’ You go back there and get a bigger one and you come back and they’re gone. There are other methods used to steal shoes. I wouldn’t like to reveal them."

I say something about cartoons I've seen in which a female customer has the salesman bring out shoe after shoe after shoe for her to try on and then leaves, buying nothing. “Every once in a while you get a few of those," Nick says. “Often, it's not because they only want to try shoes, it’s because whatever shoe they are trying does not fit.

“But about 80 percent know what they want. Others think they want one thing, but they wind up with something else entirely. They'll say, 'Oh, wow, I love that shoe!' But after they try it on, if it hurts, maybe it’s as this woman who was here said, ‘too heavy,' not appealing to your foot.

“Also, people are more practical now. Used to be the customer would buy a pair of tennis shoes to work in and pay $50, $60 for a high heel, now it has reversed. Now they spend $10 or $20 for high heels to go dancing and $70 or $80 for a walking shoe."

George kicks in. "Shoes, if you are buying a quality shoe, have gotten to be a small investment. When you walk out of here, you may have spent over a $100 with a shoe and a purse and maybe some care products. When I started selling shoes, shoes were $4.95. Top-grade men's shoes — all-leather soles, heels, all-leather uppers were $9.95.

"Shoes were made better 30 years ago. Now they don’t make them as sturdy as they used to. The heavy brogue, for instance. It was $32.95 30 years ago, it's up to $175 now. It used to have all-leather heels, now it's partial-leather heels, with a plastic wedge inserted between the leather."

Why leather, for shoes?

"Leather shoes," says Nick, "are easier on the foot, and leather breathes. Same way it breathes on the animal. Plastic doesn't breathe. Plastic burns my feet. Lot of people have that reaction to it. Now with cloth, you have a shoe made out of that, it loses its shape in no time at all. Leather tends to hold its shape. The nice real soft glove leather, which is too soft, you put it on and you say, oh beautiful, but it won’t hold the foot and you need something that will hold the foot."

The very best leather?

George answers. "Kangaroo's good, very supple and very soft. Baseball players wear shoes made of kangaroo. because it’s like a glove. If you want the shoe to be exotic, any reptiles are good, or for a nice high finish, your black calfskin's good. If you want the shoe to be rugged, say you're a car salesman walking on gravel all the time, you might want to buy kip or cowhide."

Kip?

"Kip," George explains, "is from the eight months or older animal." Then he adds, almost apologetically. "Shoes are a total by-product. These shoes are not here because the animal was killed solely for the hide. The animal was disposed of for its carcass, and the hide is its by-product."

What about feet? They must have seen every kind of foot imaginable. And some feet, I venture, must be very dirty.

Nick laughs, "Sometimes they take their shoes off and you feel like going back there and throwing up. But many customers take very good care of their feet. Many get pedicures."

"A foot," George suggests, "is like fingerprints. They’re all different. And,” he adds, "it's very intimate touching a stranger’s foot.”

Nick agrees. "It is."

George continues. "Very few times does anyone disrobe a part of their body in front of a public person who is not a member of the family. One of those times is when you’re buying shoes."

"Mmmm," says Nick, "you find a lot of women coming in here that there’s no way they will let you take their shoe off. It's too personal. Some will say to you, ‘I will put it on myself.’ "

I mention that selling shoes would be an attractive job for a foot fetishist.

George looks pained. "I don’t think you get much of that."

But Nick takes the question easily. "We don't get to playing around that much."

“You still keep that salesman/client relationship," says George, "so you don't really give the idea that you are trying to ask to be intimate. You don't play with their foot."

Nick laughs, "I feel like some customers are asking, ‘Please play with my foot.' "

George has gone to help an older woman. I ask Nick about himself. He was born, he says, in Arizona, where his father worked as a repairman for a smelter. "He worked there for 40-some years."

When did Nick get into shoes?

"I did it in high school, as a part-time job. There was an opening — wash windows, clean up, maybe do a little selling. I kind of liked it, and then after a year I didn't like it. I quit four times. But they would call me, and I would go back.

"When I came to California in 1959, Streicher’s had an ad in the paper. I went in to apply. They told me, 'Start right now.' So, that was it. Couple of times I was thinking of quitting but... finding that green grass on the other side. You have your own grass, and although you know a greener one is out there, well, taking that first step... I never have liked the idea, especially when I am hitting good solid ground."

Nick excuses himself. He strides, chest expanding, arms out, toward two women who brood over a display of Naturalizers’ sensible, carefully seamed oxfords.

I go to eavesdrop on George and the elderly lady who is his customer. While George slips her stockinged feet into a plain, low-heeled pump of the same brand and style she says she’s bought previously at Streicher’s, the woman tells George that her husband, ill several years, recently died. "I’m picking up life again," she says, as she pushes her weight up out the chair and begins to walk, steps small, back and forth across the carpet. She looks toward George, seated spine-straight on his fitting stool, she sighs, "This is the best-feeling shoe I’ve ever gotten."

Nearby, Nick prepares to show one of the brooding women the shoe she’s asked to try. "My feet," she’s saying, a wince contracting her face, "kind of swell, not too much, but enough to make a shoe feel a little bit too tight."

"Ohhh," says Nick, while with shoebox laid across his lap, he unhurriedly draws back a corner of the pastel paper tissue wrappings. His big hands in delicious retard (and the women's eyes zeroed in, their mouths pursed), he ever so slowly, lovingly, lays back the tissue sheets, his fingers burrowing down and drawing out at last, as if bringing to birth, to first breath, some newborn creature, a beige low-wedge skimmer. "Ah," the women say, "ah.”

Nick lifts the shoe aloft, its arch cradled in his palm. Quickly, now, he sets the box next him on the carpet, holds the shoe out for his customer's foot. "Okay, young lady. You don't need a shoehorn, you can jump right into them.”

By a few minutes before noon, both men have made several sales. Mostly, though, they've visited with people who've come in to browse or to pay on charge accounts.

About the latter, Nick says, "We are the only Streicher's store that has them. All our stores used to. We have them because we have so many customers in Mexico. Until recently those customers could not use their credit cards outside Mexico. There was no guarantee of payment on them. Now Visa and MasterCharge have been made international and they're starting to use those cards, so that’s hurting our charge business a little."

"Someone." says George, "living in Mexico, they are so proud to have a charge in the United States That we trust them. They are great people to wait on. Sometimes they come in for a kid's shoe, the grandparents will be here, the parents will be here, the other children will be here, sometimes you will have ten people up here, only buying one item."

How do Nick's salesmen decide who takes which customer?

"I have what is called an ‘open floor.' I don't have an ups system. Each salesperson has a fair turn. If a person doesn't want to try to help that customer, I don't need them. So consequently if I have an open floor, they work around it much better."

George breaks in. "Shoe people are always commission. That’s your paycheck. If I sell the shoe, I walk away with the two dollars in my paycheck. If you were paid a flat $200 a week and that's it, you couldn't care less."

Nick says, "Basically you will encourage someone to buy a shoe because you are building your paycheck. You also will be building relationships with customers who may not buy this time but will buy the next time. 'Come in and see Nick, come in and see George.' That's the name of the game. Repeats."

To which George adds. "We've been in sales of shoes to the point where it’s built a sense of security. You don't know if you'd want to go out now and start driving tractor-trailer. So you have to learn to live within your price range of what you're earning, whereas in other professions, people have gone beyond. I started in the shoe business when baseball players were making eight or nine thousand dollars a year. Now they make eight or nine million. I have only tripled my income from when I first started. A shoe person's life earnings don’t radically go way up the scale."

"No," Nick says, "they don't."

George grew up in New York, worked for several years as a leather buyer for a shoe manufacturer, then moved to California. "All I've done for 40 years is sell shoes. Selling shoes has taken care of me all these years, it’s gotten me pretty much whatever I’ve wanted. Not probably a glamorous phrase to say, 'I'm a shoe salesman,' or, 'I work with shoes,' but you can go anywhere in the world and find a job. And the old phrase goes, 'If you can sell shoes, you can sell anything.' I still think it holds true."

Had he ever sold anything else?

"I've sold roofing. I thought I wanted to be outdoors."

George goes on. "Each year that goes by and you're in it longer and longer, you tend to lean more on that security of it. Lake knowing you are getting up and going off to work, you know what you have to do, you know it like the back of your hand. I think that’s in it too. And there’s the social aspect. Maybe you will say, ‘Mrs. Fritz is coming in tomorrow. I will have to see if I can get her shoe for her.' You come to look forward to seeing the Mrs. Fritzes.

"If you are working with someone, I think I am closer to this man,” George indicates Nick, who is at the store’s far end, fitting a man in a boot, "than I am to my own family. You build a relationship. I am perhaps more fond of his parents than I was of my own. That’s where it is too, the camaraderie. Supposing I didn't show up. He knows I am here at eight every morning. He gets here, and it is eight-thirty or quarter to nine, if I’m not here he will feel some apprehension. Vice versa. It’s a family."

Does George ever dream about shoes?

"Very rare. That's something you shut out of your mind as soon as you get home." George collects movies, owns 5000, maybe more.

Are there films about shoe salesmen?

"Can’t say I know of one. Maybe I can do that when I retire. Make a movie.” He pauses. "Shoe people never retire, they just lose their soul.”