The Past in Present Tense

A friend had told me to go there, a small shop across the street from Newport Beach City Hall. He said I’d know why as soon as I saw the sign on the storefront.

It was an ordinary sign--”Tivoli Shoe Repair”--but beside it was this bland yet remarkable addendum: “75 Yrs. Experience.”

Seventy-five years? There aren’t many people around with 75 years of breathing experience. Seventy-five years of shoemaking?

I asked the young man behind the counter whether I could speak with Mr. Tivoli. He invited me into the back. It was like stepping into a Smithsonian exhibit.

The room had the dark, claustrophobic clutter you see in those history-book photos of sweatshops. The wooden benches were darkened by decades of skin oil and perspiration. The buffing and grinding and sewing machines were big and black and brawny and driven by wide leather belts. It took no expert to see that they were at least a half-century old.

Stooped over a vise was a short, slight man. All I could see was his dark but graying hair, which was combed straight back, and his hands and arms, which were of about the same color and toughness as the workbench. His wide fingers were stained by shoe dye, his apron by glue. He was working on the stubborn heel of a woman’s shoe.

The young man asked me to wait. Mr. Tivoli does not like to stop in the middle of a problem, he explained. I waited, noticing for the first time that a radio somewhere was playing an Italian opera.

When Dominico Tivoli stood up, I was amazed. It seemed that I had seen him hundreds of times before, but I realized it had been in the insets of history books and in the jerky footage of TV documentaries. He was all those men who funneled into America through Ellis Island. For the first time, I could talk to them, face to face.

And what a face--thin, drawn, creased, with a brushy mustache and tiny glasses seemingly set too close together for his eyes. It was an alert, confident face. It looked 85 years old--it is 85--but not in the feeble way. It looked merely weathered.

Is it true, I asked, that you have been a shoemaker for 75 years?

His answer was in jumbled, immigrant English, seemingly unaffected by his 65 years in America. His accent was as thick as tomato paste.

“Yes, I am,” he said. “Yeah, it’s-a no question for some such a thing. I don’t know, I don’t do it. That’s true.”

He invited me to the rear of the workshop, where we sat down at a table with an oilcloth cover. The young man sat down with us. From an espresso pot stained the color of an oil drum he poured out a small cup of what looked like crankcase oil.

“Now drink-a this coff’, you get somewhere. There sugar. You want some-a this? I give you something you never drink-a. Now mix. Mix right.” He spooned in some other substances and we drank. It was good.

Before I could ask another question, he started talking about the shoemaking business. He had started when he was in his hometown of Gulina--I think that’s what he said. I was only sure of about half or three-quarters of his words. Some (indicated by “---”) escaped me entirely.

“Today the new generation, they think, but mostly they don’t work out, see? So, the shoe business, we even got the --- --- --- we have-a 25, 30 year ago. Today we got the people --- --- --- --- soles and-a heels. See, just temporary. Just a --- mechanical.

“But, me, I’m a shoe maker . Because I can get a piece a leather, make a pair of shoes. See, they don’t do no more. They don’t want no more. They don’t need it. See, everything is-a glue. No more sewin’. It’s a hundred percent. They want-a shoes, buy today and throw ‘em out tomorrow.”

He talked about arriving in New York in 1920, looking for work, avoiding the tough gangs, trying to start his own shop, moving to Los Angeles in 1942, losing all his money, then finally winding up in Balboa and staying there 14 years until high rent forced him to his present location. He still lives in Balboa.

He excused himself to tend to a customer, and I asked the young man, Michael Kazz, a 19-year-old from Irvine, whether he was some relation.

“People assume so, but I’m just the apprentice right now,” he said. “You learn something from him everyday. He knows so much. People really appreciate him. He’s like a grandpa to them. He’s so friendly.”

Why does he still work so hard, I asked.

“He loves it. He just gets by. He saves up some, I think.”

Mr. Tivoli returned. Is business good, I asked.

“Well, I tell you. Business good, and business-a no good. I’m-a smile. I feel that I like-a the people, I love-a the people, see? So I kinda help ‘em. But today, you can’t, because you don’t know what you’re gettin’, see? Thing-a mixed up. Mixed up-a so bad you can’t get-a no head or no tail, see? So, sometime, I don’t know, I gotta do it. Because I’m a friend of everybody.”

Several customers came in and left--modern people who obviously adored this antiquity. “How are you, Darling,” said one expensively dressed woman. “Pretty good, Toots,” Mr. Tivoli replied.

I stayed for a while, awed by what I could understand. After I left, I wondered what has made us lose respect for our Mr. Tivolis.

Technology, I guess. Nowadays, ways of doing things change overnight, making the old methods inefficient and, well, old. We assume that degrades them.

Yet watching a Mr. Tivoli hand-stitch a soft leather sole to a fine pair of shoes can make you wonder what efficiency has cost us. We high-tech types are up-to-date, but we may never know what Mr. Tivoli knows. And what we do may not last half as long as a pair of his shoes.