Evening Republican, Volume 23, Number 209, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 August 1920 — BOOTS NOW AND LONG AGO [ARTICLE]

BOOTS NOW AND LONG AGO

Some Difference in the Price of Pumps and the First Real Cop per-Toed Pair. Do you remember your first pair of boots, with the copper toes,, bright and shiny, proof that you were a real fellow, asks Charles E. Hunt in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. And the red leather tops? And do you recall that you had not yet learned to distinguish the right from the left foot and went back to Shoemaker Condon to get him to show you? And didn’t he punch a hole in the red top of the right one, by which you were to know that went on the right foot? • What happened in the school yard that first morning you appeared with the boots on? Didn’t Kitten Smith with full knowledge of his advantage according to the rules of the game, walk up and deliberately “Put-too” right across the shiny copper toe, and didn’t your trusted chum Dutch Magee do the same. And while you were playing “pum, pum, pull-away” and before the last bell rang didn’t every boy In the school yard spit on your boots to break ’em In, as they called If? Hadn’t every feller before you stood for It? And seeing as how you were the proud owner of the only pair of new boots with copper toes in the whole school couldn’t you afford to let them show envy? And have you forgotten the heavy, damp snow and the first day when you went sliding down hill and catching on bobsleds and got your feet wet? And how .the new boots pulled off hard and mother put them under the kitchen stove to dry? And next morning when you' tried to put them on? And how you pulled and suffered and the skin seemed to be peeling off your feet in layers? But you get them on, didn’t you? Do you remember how every inch of skin shrieked out your agony as you walked to school and your drawn face but ill concealed your pain? Didn’t you envy the fellers with their old broken-in boots. Do you remember the hitching posts that lined the curb along Main street. And the big auger holes in them and the wood that had been chewed away by the horses because their owners had been in town tracing all day and the horses were tired ?, That has to do with Vene Hershom, don’t it? And didn’t Vene ajways come to town with his pants tucked in his boots, and he' wore a coat, and his big coarse straw hat was'torn, and he traded and the store let him have the things without money until his harvest was In? And what would Vene’s big boots cost him today If shoes are high because of the high cost of leather? Do you recall what you paid for Erlend Wife’s new pumps because the newest heels are not so high and French heels are going out? Figuring on the cost of leather, Vene could not afford boots, could het Because If they cost the same as wife’s pumps on the leather alone, Vene would pay $197.63, plus war tax, wouldn’t he?