“He was dressed as if everything he wore had come from a rummage sale, except that the crease in his trousers was sharp and his shoes were shined.” — Beverly Cleary

That’s not me in the photo above.  It’s just some anonymous kid in a photo I found on Google. But it could be me.  It’s the right era and I used to look something like that when I shined shoes.  At one time, I could even bend my legs backward like that.  But there is one thing out of place:  I never had a client who dressed that well.

My clients were usually drunk.  For a few summers around 1950, Red and I, carting around our little homemade shoeshine boxes, shined the shoes of the patrons of the dive bars on Compton Boulevard near the LA River.

The bartenders didn’t like Red and me coming in to “hassle” their customers, so we had to keep a low profile.  We would usually slip inside quietly when the bartender was at the far end of the bar counter. (Since we were both under five feet tall, it wasn’t hard to remain out of sight.)  Then we would sidle up to a guy wearing patent leather shoes and whisper, “Need a shine?”  If the guy said yes, we would dip down below the counter and go to work.

It was dark down there, so I would sometimes get as much shoe polish on my customer’s trouser cuffs as I would on his shoes. But since the guy usually had a buzz on and was up there blathering about this and that, he was oblivious to what was going on below.  Besides, that’s what he deserved for hanging around a bar after work instead of going home to his wife and kids.

By the way, shoeshine boys and whores know this about their clientele:  the drunker the guy, the bigger the tip—and the less pressure there is to do a good job.

Here’s a couple of shoeshine boys (circa 1900) shooting marbles.  You can see the kid’s shoeshine box in the lower right.  Shoeshining was an equal opportunity occupation.  Kids of all colors and classes (though usually sons of blue-collar dads) took it up. All it took was a homemade shoebox, some wax polish, a rag or a brush, and a  willingness to engage the passing stream of humanity: “Want a shine, mister?”

Here are two curious facts about shoeshine boys.  The first photograph of a human being shows a man getting his shoes shined on the Boulevard du Temple in Paris (1838).  And the first song to receive a gold record, Chattanooga Choo Choo (Glenn Miller, 1941), featured a shoeshine boy in these opening lines.

“Pardon me, boy, is that the Chattanooga Choo Choo?”
“Yes, yes, track 29.”
“Boy, you can give me a shine.”

Although shoeshine boys are still common in third-world countries, they’ve mostly disappeared in the US.   I suspect they died off here because of the proliferation of sneakers and busybody adults who frowned on small boys in the workforce.

But a few shoeshine men survive, mostly in airports.  According to a Google search, there are fifty airports, including my own Portland PDX, that have shoeshine stands, all operated by adults, of course.

My shoeshine career didn’t last long. When I was about twelve or thirteen, I drifted into pool halls and bowling alleys, where there were more opportunities to improve my cash flow.  There were bowling pins to be set, scores to be kept for league bowlers, and a few years later on, suckers to be fleeced.  I had my sights set on a Whizzer motorbike, and I could now see a way of earning enough scratch to buy one.

Shoeshining probably wasn’t a good career choice anyway.