‘All you see today are sneakers. I tell you, the day of the well-dressed man is dead.’ : Most of the World Walks On By, but the Memories Still Shine

Sometimes, during the depressingly long stretches between customers, Lee Calton sits in the big maroon High Chair at the Burbank airport and reminisces about the fast-stepping, spit-polished heyday of the professional shoeshine.

Of course, that was back in the 1930s and 1940s, when Hollywood’s elite--the actors and producers, directors and agents, gangsters and politicians--all stepped up to Calton’s chair at Rothschild’s haberdashery in Beverly Hills for a five-minute shine and a strong dose of street wisdom.

His regulars were the likes of Bugsy Siegel, Al Capone, Mickey Cohen, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Groucho Marx, Nelson Rockefeller and Cecil B. De Mille--well-dressed men who, like Calton, appreciated the subtle aesthetics of the freshly polished shoe.

They were spanking, elegant times when Calton entertained customers by snapping an old cotton polish rag in perfect rhythm to the high-blown jazz and big band tunes that played on his portable radio--laughing and scatting and making people smile and shake their heads.

At night, when he wasn’t working the door at the old Beverly Hills Tropics nightclub, a lean and wiry Calton would himself step out on the town, dressed in his dapper fedora, double-breasted suit, gold jewelry and the finest pair of brown-toned leather beauties money could buy.

On the wall behind his shoeshine stand at the airport hangs a gallery of old black and white photographs showing a much younger Calton in his nightclub days, sharing a table with Nat (King) Cole--always natty, always smiling, unmistakably full of life.

“Ha! Ha! Ha! I sure spent some money in those days,” he says, flashing a tattoo on his left forearm, the now-faded image of a nude woman coiled in a champagne glass.

*

At age 82, Calton can no longer make a living from the job that bought him half a dozen new cars and paid for his one-story dream house. Still, he arrives each day at 5:45 a.m. at the airport barbershop--not for what little he earns for the occasional $2 shine, but as a way to hold onto the cologne-scented atmosphere of the swirling shoe wax, saddle soap and friendly banter he has come to love.

Now, Calton gazes out the shop window and wonders how his footlight parade of cigar-smoking customers dwindled to the few still willing to sit for a shoeshine and take an unhurried look back at yesterday.

“Look at that!” Calton scoffs, pointing to a passerby. “All you see today are sneakers. I tell you, the day of the well-dressed man is dead.”

The result has put professionals like Calton right out of business. Once a staple of barbershops and fine hotels in post-World War II America, shoeshining is a disappearing trade.

Although statistics are hard to come by, shoeshine stands have become nearly extinct except for airports and an occasional city street, as leather has given way to cheap plastic and synthetics that don’t need shining.

“The shoeshine profession is like a dinosaur, it’s dying out before our eyes,” said Jack Lavin, a spokesman for the Hotel and Restaurant Employees International Union.

“America’s dress code has changed. The shiny shoes and creased pants look is gone. Gone forever. And the shoeshine is sure to follow.”

Like a lone relay runner, Calton says he has no one to whom he can pass his shoeshine brush: “Nobody wants this job. Kids today, they think it’s demeaning to even think about shining somebody else’s shoes.”

But Calton’s artful hands, blackened by boot polish, still go proudly about their business day after day, a pair of wrinkled experts that over 70 years have known their way around more than a million pairs of shoes.

“I’m going to keep shining shoes until the day I die, or my profession dies off,” he sighs. “Whichever comes first.”

As he has since 1971, Calton still caters to a handful of loyal Burbank airport businessmen--because nobody knows shoes like Calton.

All day long, the eighth-grade dropout spouts little bits of wisdom that have taken a career to compile: that Italian-made leather is the best bargain on the planet, that black wears better than brown, that it takes a really special polish to beat the baking heat of the Western desert.

Customers seem to come back for the conversation as much as the shoeshine.

“It’s so surprising that a man who has shined shoes all his life is so knowledgeable about current affairs,” said Jarman Holland, a computer salesman who has visited Calton for more than a decade. “Every time I sit in the chair, Lee’s ready to talk turkey.”

Calton still has the body of a man half his age, the taut frame of a boxer or a gymnast--flat stomach, muscular forearms. And the smile, it wins you.

And how he still likes to dress, still likes the image of himself in expensive suits and shiny shoes, a reminder of the days when his step was quicker, when he and his profession were young.

*

Calton came to California in 1934 shining shoes. He had left home in Arcadia, La., years earlier and hitched a ride on a freight train to the East Texas oil fields, where a friend taught him the shining trade--a job that Calton remembers thinking was good, honest work.

During the summers, Calton recalls, he became a utility player with different teams in the old Negro baseball leagues--the Kansas City Monarchs, Halstead Greys or American Giants out of Chicago--the teams that were the only game in town for black players when the big leagues were white preserves.

But he had the most fun touring with the African Zulus--which back then was baseball’s version of the Harlem Globetrotters. In fact, he says, the team was run by Abe Saperstein, the Globetrotters’ owner, and they used the same touring bus as the basketball team.

Yeah, the Zulus sure raised some eyebrows.

“We’d roll into town and conversations would stop in mid-word,” Calton says. “All of us were barefooted, wearing these big wigs and grass skirts. We were supposed to be straight out of Africa and we played our games in these get-ups.

“In small towns, we gave people heart attacks, scared them to death getting off that bus, ballyhooing at each other in this fake African dialect, ‘Who-bally-bally-who-ahhhh!’ Later, we would just die laughing.”

In California, Calton worked in Beverly Hills until the late 1940s, when he took a yearlong job as butler for the late actor Tyrone Power. After that, he spent 17 years at the Los Angeles Athletic Club--shining shoes by day, working the door at night.

Fifty years later, those Beverly Hills days still stick in his mind.

Like the time gangster Bugsy Siegel arrived at the haberdashery with his entourage and caught Calton gawking at him through the barbershop window.

“What are you looking at?” the gangster snapped.

“Nothing, Mr. Siegel,” Calton remembers responding. “It’s just that you look like hell in that sports jacket.”

Later, after a manicure, Siegel walked past Calton and threw the jacket on his lap: “I’ll always remember how he looked at me and said, ‘Here, you SOB, the jacket’s yours now.’ I wore that jacket for years and years.”

Or the day he yanked Cecil B. De Mille from his chair with a panicked pull of his shine cloth. The director was discussing with a fellow customer his most recent project, which he mentioned had cost $4 million.

“I had just never heard of that kind of money before,” Calton recalls. “I was so shocked I pulled back on the cloth and he almost fell out of the chair. I apologized and told him that I couldn’t imagine what $4 million even looked like. And he just tipped his head back and laughed.”

With that, with all the memories and their sweet retelling, shoeshine Lee Calton tips his own head back and he laughs, too.