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A counter separated the customer and the shoe repair guy. Halfway through the second day, a man on his way to a golf outing stopped in to retrieve shoes. Expenses quickly exceeded meager savings. Occasionally, customers would stop by to pick up repaired shoes.Īll the while, the Jordans were falling further behind on rent. Eventually, they ventured back to the shop, keeping their door locked. When they learned about the growing threat of COVID-19, Joe and Hattie closed the shop and holed up at home. It’s affected the quality of his work, Joe said.Īfter more than 50 years, though, with the shop faltering, he’s not ready to close down. When he was young, Joe could take apart a pair of men’s dress shoes and rebuild them in a half hour. People wear down just like soles and heels do. Now, the couple lament more people wearing flip flops and what Hattie calls “gym shoes.” It became harder for Hattie to match the exploding array of colors. Eventually, the grown grandchildren followed. Over time, they noticed grown kids of early customers coming in. Wedding shoes for Hattie to dye or footwear to set right for celebrities. Customers would bring items other shops condemned as unsalvageable.
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(ALYSSA POINTER / there remained so much to fix. The owner of the shoes told Jordan that a dog chewed the back of one.
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Joe Jordan, 82, owner of Cato Shoe Repair, shows off a shoe he will repair at his store in Atlanta. The young man showed no enthusiasm for it. Joe attempted to convince their grandson to learn the craft. Their only child, a daughter, tried other careers but not shoe repair. Dirt that can’t be cleaned from under fingernails. If the pandemic doesn’t get in the way, her husband said, he’d like to be working when he’s 85. “I have more shoes than I can ever wear.” “I said, ‘Lord, let me marry a man who don’t drink, and let me have a lot of shoes.’” Like her husband, she unexpectedly found she enjoyed some of the work in the shop, where she dyed and cleaned handbags and luggage. “He just found a hot piece of pepper,” she said. He had stopped by to ask for a green pepper out of the garden. He had met her while she was visiting a neighbor’s house. His rent: $25 a month.īy then, he and Hattie were already married. Three years later, the chain’s owner, whose last name was Cato, offered to sell him a new store, starting with $1 down and then payments over time. “I kind of fell in love with it,” he said. That’s where he learned to appreciate the many forms of footwear and the challenges of giving them new life. Dangerous and boring sounded like a bad combination for a career.īut when he went to the unemployment office after leaving the service in the early 1960s, a staffer pushed him toward a job at a small chain of Atlanta shoe repair shops. He saw other shoe guys accidentally cut themselves while working on shoes with sharp tools. He trained to do shoe repair in the Army. (ALYSSA POINTER / rely on money from the shop to supplement their Social Security and help pay bills. Hattie says she’s ready to stop working while Joe says he loves the challenge of fixing items. She says she was roped into working with her husband in the beginning and has been in the shop with him since the 1960s. Hattie Jordan, wife of Joe Jordan, cuts loose string from a boot that her husband will repair at their shop, Cato Shoe Repair, in Atlanta.