"I was a shoe salesman before Al Bundy made the profession famous"

             

   In August of 2010, I published my first book, "If the shoe fits, Wear it” The life and times of a shoe salesman. I guess you could call it an autobiography, inspirational, and motivational funny story of my life as a young man contemplating becoming a shoe magnate. I love to write stories as all of you who read my blog can see and the enjoyment I received as I wrote this book was priceless. As I relived the past and thought about some of the tricks and antics we pulled on customers, I would sometimes laugh aloud and sometimes shed a tear as I typed away on my computer. The idea of writing a book started back in the early 1970's on the sales floor of one of the two shoe stores my brother and I opened in Macon, Georgia. I was nineteen years old at the time, newly married and left a management position in North Carolina working for Butler Shoe Corporation to return to Macon and go into business for myself. If you have never opened your own business, allow me to clue you in on one major factor, unless you have plenty of cash in reserve you will have no salary when you start your journey into entrepreneurship. My brother and I left salaried positions to begin our venture into the world of business ownership. As previously mentioned I was newly married so I had to depend on my wife salary to support us and allowing me to take a chance on my making it big for our future. On this particular spring morning Mickey was waiting on a customer and going back and forth from the stock room to the sales floor bringing shoes for this lady to try on. There was a pretty large stack of shoes piling up when the customer decided she would wait and come back later. As she was strolling out the door, Mickey leaned against the counter, looked at me and said, "one day we should write a book about our adventures in the shoe business." We had both started selling shoes around the age of sixteen. I asked him the only question I could come up with, "what would we call it?" His answer was brilliant, "If the shoe fits wear it." We both laughed and went about the business of putting the shoes away in the stockroom. For the next thirty years that conversation stuck in my mind and in 2008, sitting at the deck bar on a Carnival Cruise ship, I took a napkin and pen and began writing the works that I published in 2010.
    Life has a way of coming full circle things that happen in our past sometimes become reality in our present and future time. Looking back and thinking about what we could have done and should have done sometimes brings us to what will be done. I never thought I would write and complete a book, much less put it into print and have it on the Amazon website. Determination and fortitude is what I attribute to reaching that goal. Writing a story about yourself is not easy; you relive the good times and the times that were not so good.
    In my early days in 1969, at Butler Shoes in the Westgate Mall in Macon, I met a guy who has continued to be one of my best friends and like a brother throughout the years. The day I met him I thought, he sure thinks a lot of himself. He had dark, shoulder length hair with a great bushy mustache. He reminded me of Chuck Negron of the Three Dog Night singing group. He dressed like he had just stepped out of GQ magazine and had a long Marlboro cigarette hanging from his mouth. It wasn't long before he and I became best friends hanging out and pretty much going everywhere together. We went with our dates to concerts and dances and we even danced on stage with Percy Sledge at the Shurlington National Guard Armory. We always tried to out dress each other spending the money we made on suits and ties, we were best friends and still are today. This friend indoctrinated me into the shoe business in those early days. As a young teenage boy, selling shoes was a great job. You worked in a climate controlled store, got to dress nice and the money if you worked hard was really good for part-time work. We were all tricksters and played tricks on other sales guys, especially the new ones. The tricks we played were harmless but funny, I go into detail in my book on a lot of these tricks, but no one was offended or hurt we just had a lot of fun. One of the best tricks we played was when one of the sales guys was waiting on a really pretty girl and trying to impress her, one of the other sales guys would walk up and say, " excuse me, your wife called and asked if you would stop by the store and bring some milk home for the baby" this would always dump cold water on his flirtatious presentation. We were cocky young men and didn't mind letting people know it. I remember once asking a Regional Vice President to hand me a pair of shoes from the stock wall, it was on the top shelf and I couldn't reach it without climbing the wall. He looked at me for a minute, smiled reached up got the shoes and handed them to me. I learned a lot about life and business in the retail shoe industry, an education equivalent to a marketing degree in any institution of higher learning. I was taught the art of customer service and the patience of Job as I waited on women and children patiently fitting shoes on feet that required a size much larger than the ones I was trying to put on the foot. I learned about doing jobs that I wasn't really interested in doing but realizing we have to go beyond our wants to accomplish our goals. I learned how to use my imagination which allowed me to get through life and become creative.       Music was a large part of life back then too. We had an old radio that sat on the floor in the back of the store and it would blare out Crosby, Stills and Nash, Three Dog Night, or the Temptations songs to keep us singing and happy. We would gather around that radio, when the business was slow, smoke our cigarettes and just tell our stories each one trying to come up with one to outdo the other. If only I had a time machine and could go back in time,
   I think if I could go back in time, the road as a writer would be my choice in life; spending time in my office reliving memories that I cherish and putting those stories that live in my head into words on paper. I have recently completed my first novel, The Bullet. I have been in contact with a couple of publishers about putting the work into print. Novels and biographies are so different; a novel can be stories that are in your head and intriguing to tell. I believe life is just one big story waiting to be told, our stories are interesting pieces of work that are special to someone somewhere. I don't want my stories to stay buried in my head; I want them to be alive and interesting, special in the fact that they may be entertaining to someone. Several years ago there was an HBO sitcom entitled "Arliss," at the opening Arliss would say, "I'm Arliss and these are my stories." Well "Life Happens" and these are my stories. I hope they entertain you and you enjoy reading them.

Life Happens