Shoeshiner Watches Tennis Shoes Go By

It is still dark out when Dewey Wallace comes to work. There is almost no one on the street, but at 5:30 a.m., he sets up anyway.

This does not involve anything elaborate. Two chairs on a stand. A few cans of shoe polish. Rags, a few brushes.

And when the shoeshine stand is ready to go, Dew Wallace sits and waits.

I found him at 2 p.m. I was his third customer of the day. His first customer had come a half-hour before.

Which means that Dewey Wallace waited eight hours, an entire workday for most people, for his first income of the day.

He charges $1.25 for a shoeshine. And he has never been tipped more than a quarter in his life.

“C’mon,” I said to him. “You’ve got to be kidding. Nobody has ever handed you two dollar bills and just said, ‘Keep it’ ”?

“Nobody,” he said. “A quarter is the biggest tip I ever got and it has to be a pretty good person to do that and sometimes I don’t get any tip at all.”

Dewey Wallace is 73. He was wearing work pants, a tan jacket and a tan cap. The shoeshine brush looked small in his hands.

He used to shovel coal for a living with those hands, but that was long ago. Hardly anybody burns coal anymore, and so Dewey Wallace shines shoes.

There are other shoeshine men who do make a good living at their trade, but maybe they are in better locations or give a little performance with the work.

Dewey Wallace just shines the shoes. He doesn’t snap the rag or give some fancy patter. He just steadily, seriously shines the shoes. He gives an honest shine and if he has never been tipped more than a quarter, that is a reflection on his customers and not on his work.

“How can you make a living at this?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I just like to be down here,” he said. “I don’t want to be around the house. I do it just to do it.”

I told him that I have never felt comfortable having my shoes shined. At my first job, there was a shoeshine place just down the block from the newspaper and it was a tradition for reporters to go there.

I would always make some excuse and duck out. Until one day I was dragged along and was made to sit, fidgeting in the chair, with my feet up on the metal posts.

“This ain’t the dentist,” the shoeshine guy said. “Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

I explained to him that it just didn’t seem right for me to be sitting above him, while he crouched over my shoes taking care of my needs. I said I felt uncomfortable.

He sighed and put down the brush. “I shine shoes for a living,” he told me. “It’s what I do. I ain’t going to become a computer programmer. I shine shoes and I shine them good and you don’t have to be embarrassed about it, because I’m not.”

Dewey Wallace nodded as I told him the story.

“It’s mostly the older people who come in now,” he said. “Everyone else is in these athletic shoes. You know those shoes?”

Sure, you see them, everywhere. Guys in business suits and women in business suits carrying briefcases with the Wall Street Journal under their arms maybe and these things on their feet. These Pumas and Adidas and Saucony and Reebok and Nike things on their feet. Maybe they change them when they get to work. I don’t know. But I do know one thing: They don’t get them shined.

“Yeah, young people, well, even if young people are wearing real shoes, they just don’t care anymore, anyway,” Dewey Wallace said.

I asked him which was tougher: shoveling coal or shining shoes. He looked at me as if I were crazy.

“Shoveling coal,” he said. “What do you think?”

He finished and I paid him and we talked for a little while. Then he sat down again and waited, just as he had been waiting since 5:30 that morning.

I asked him if maybe it wasn’t time to go home.

“Oh, no, I got to be here,” he said. “You never know when a customer will come. You’ll never know when somebody will need me.”