Times Force These Boots To Walk
The Dream Team killed Woehrlin’s Shoe Repair.
The Dream Team and Michael Jordan and Andre Agassi and Ken Griffey Jr. and all the other superstar jocks who convinced us that Nikes and Reeboks were the culturally cool things to stick on our feet.
“Sneakers put us out of business,” concedes Bob Woehrlin, 75, with a sigh. “The trade magazines say 70 percent of Americans wear tennis shoes. Only 7 percent of the rest even bother to get their shoes repaired.
Woehrlin, a lanky, former World War II submariner, lights a cigarette and adds, “Guys like me can’t make it any more.”
After nearly five decades in shoe biz, Woehrlin plans to close his shop in Spokane’s East Central neighborhood, 3118 E. 5th, at the end of the month.
“It’s very sad,” says Woehrlin’s son, Bobby, 33, who went to work with his dad the day after high school graduation.
“We’ve become such a throw-away society.”
Woehrlin’s is an institution, one of a dwindling breed of mom and pop operations that have been gradually phased out by changing times and modern values.
Bob and his wife, Betty, who died last May, raised three children inside this cavernous, tool-cluttered shop. He taught his kids the trade, often putting them on an assembly line dyeing and polishing leather shoes for department stores.
Bobby, in turn, was raising his own family in this pungent atmosphere of leather and shoe grease. Facing job extinction, he went back to school to learn how to make prosthetics and orthotics.
The man isn’t bitter about starting over.
“My dad thinks he didn’t leave me much here, but he really did. He left me the skills and tools of the business. He’s done everything to help pave my way.”
Spokane had 36 traditional shoe repair shops when Woehrlin gave up tending bar and bought this business from his brother-in-law in 1952.
Today, there are just a handful of enterprises like Woehrlin’s, where practically any shoe or boot can be torn apart and put back together good as new.
There are more quickie mall outlets where “instant repairs” are made. Not Woehrlin’s. This place hasn’t changed since the Ford administration.
Along one wall are rows of old reconditioned footwear for sale. A glass counter features a display of boxes of Hollywood Sani-White polish.
There’s a hole worn all the way through the linoleum in front of Woehrlin’s ancient battle-scarred cobbler’s bench.
It was put there over time by the steady pressure of his feet as he stood banging away hour after hour, day after day on the soles of countless shoes.
Wingtips, boots, brogans, loafers, pumps, sandals …
Woehrlin actually wore out his hammer. The constant friction of his thumb rubbed all the way through the brittle hickory handle.
As the shoe business went sour, Woehrlin branched out. He fixed leather golf bags, tents, baby seats and punching bags for the police gym. With his powerful outsole and insole stitchers, he sewed conveyor belts and pillows and motorcycle leathers. He once built holsters for SWAT team vests and the Washington State Patrol’s radar guns.
No job intimidated him. Woehrlin once put a zipper on a woman’s girdle while she waited.
His attempt at stain removal, however, came to a bad end.
That happened when a woman walked into Woehrlin’s with a spot on her dress. Rising to the occasion, Woehrlin vigorously rubbed some solvent on the stain.
The next day, the woman stormed in and threw a pair of ruined panties in the cobbler’s face. The acetate, she explained in loud, heated terms, ate a hole right through her dress and underwear and into her skin.
“I learned my lesson,” says Woehrlin, laughing hard at the memory. “Stick to shoes.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo