PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC PLACES : Small Dreams, Too, Come True in Hollywood

In a little wooden house in Hollywood, Willebaldo Rivera makes shoes. The workshop is a mess, as a jungle or a forest is a mess. It is full of disorderly life. Dust gathers on shelves of boots and shoes, on rolls of soft leathers and sturdy hides piled on a glass case, on buckles, studs, scraps of velvety suede heaped on the floor. A black cat, Sunshine, guards this mice’s treasure.

Sixty years ago, Rivera sat at his grandfather’s bench in a workshop that could not have been too different from this. There was no electricity or running water, of course, and few customers who would be strangers to the shoemaker in a small Mexican town. But all that time ago in Teziutlan, the craftsmanship was the same; the thick, gentle, knowing hands covered in black polish and calluses, the firm heart of a man who makes something.

“It’s like food,” Rivera will say. “We’re an important part of life. Some people say, ‘Oh, he’s only a shoemaker.’ I say, if you go to the museums and you see statues of the greatest people since Biblical times, they have shoes.”

In his time, there was not too much choice. Rich people’s sons dreamed of becoming lawyers or doctors. When a family was poor, a boy left school at 13 and learned a trade; there were only carpenters, tailors, bakers, shoemakers. “And my family was poor, but very rich in happiness.” He sat beside his grandfather, making shoes for pennies.

When he came to the States in 1949, he left behind his own workshop. He gave it to his brother. In his mind, that’s how families are: If one has, everyone has. He took a job in a factory. “I liked it very much--there was beautiful machinery.” With his first check, he bought a tool--a pair of pliers. With each check, he bought another. He opened his own shop again after 10 years of saving. The boy who dreamed of owning a donkey has traveled the world--to Spain, Italy, France, Russia, Poland. And in each, he sought out the shoes, the shoemakers. “If it’s true we get born again,” he says, “I want to come back as shoemaker.”

He makes shoes; he also repairs shoes. Customers come into the small, simple shop and see only cheap display stands of polish, a short man in his 70s with fraying hair and the rolling gait of a workman. Oh, what they miss, the unseeing ones with their Nieman Marcus bags and I. Magnin shoes, brusquely asking for service now, heels tomorrow. The assistants to the rich issuing orders and making demands. “Willie, this . . .” and “Willie, that. . . .”

And Willebaldo Rivera smiles and shrugs. He puts away the shoes with their scuffed tips and slightly sour tinge; the perfect servant, intrigued as he always is by the condition of being alive.

Others come; they see a craftsman, an artist, the Maestro with his keen blue eyes, his noble head and rich, sweet voice. They talk to him, because he listens--philosopher, friend and shoemaker. He talks to them of time and change, of the different feel of leathers now and in the past. He connects them to what has been and what is. He talks to them of shoes, of dresses, of kindness and of children, of boots that are art and of the tiny town in Spain, hidden in the hills and pine trees, where he dreams of living one day.

In this city of shops and shopping, of walls of shoe boxes and warehouses of dress rails, when it seems at times as if all is machinery in which there are no ghosts, no human spirit--it is worth remembering, in this mood, Willebaldo Rivera, making shoes on Cahuenga Boulevard.