Toe-to-Toe With a City’s Ills

Step inside.

Walk into Compton and meet the foot doctor who believes he can heal the city’s wounds.

Everywhere he goes, Dr. Martin Marks captures attention. On Palmer Avenue, the neighbors wave as he walks by in his scrubs, the ones adorned with a picture of a foot making the peace sign. On Long Beach Boulevard, schoolchildren kick up their heels in salute as his battered yellow 1980 Mercedes with the “TOES R US” plates goes by. On Compton Boulevard, where he drives a 7-foot float in the Christmas parade, the truckers and the city councilwomen and the postal workers who deliver letters marked simply “Foot Doctor, Compton, CA” all shout:

“Hey! Footsie!”

Sure, Compton has its crime, its controversies, its hip-hop crooners, even its tennis players. But who knew of the Hub City’s collective foot fetish? In a city divided by race and politics, and language and personality, all sides agree on Marks.

“Everybody knows him,” says Mayor Omar Bradley. “He’s an eccentric gentleman but a very positive person.”

“A local treasure!” says one of the mayor’s strongest critics, Councilwoman Marcine Shaw.

“He’s just about the most popular person in the city,” says Howard Sanders of the city’s personnel board.

How does a white, Jewish podiatrist from New York get a toehold in a black and Latino Southern California town and become an icon? In one sense, the answer rests in Marks’ idea that the citizens’ soles are a window into a community’s soul. In another, it lies in the willingness of a man to lay himself bare, to slowly sacrifice education, family and worldly possessions for a vague dream in a place he has never actually lived.

Above all, the standing of Marks, 57, has to do with his feet--all 70 of them. These are his foot puppets, grotesque ghouls drawn from his imagination and a lifetime of cutting open toes and removing bunions. Their pictures hang from the walls of his office alongside photographs of his mother and of the feet of Olympic sprinter Marion Jones. He takes them to schools, churches and libraries, creating dramas that touch on the variety of ills that afflict Compton.

There are drunken foot characters, such as Tipsy Toe and Toe Bo the Hobo, who resembles the comedian Red Skelton. There are the drug addicts: Ec-toe-sy, Blue-Toe (a methamphetamine user), and Bo Knows Toes, a successful shoe manufacturer who lost his fortune to drinking and drugs. Toe-pec represents environmental degradation. Rhodes Runner--a foot that plays a saxophone, wears a condom and resembles a certain president of the United States--stands for the dangers of venereal disease.

They are his practice now. These feet inspire him, keep him running from school to school, but they do not pay the bills. His friends and his sister have told him to give up the puppets, to fill his operating rooms with real feet and real patients, to leave Compton to its own devices before he loses his practice and home for good.

Marks himself sometimes wonders. Can man live by foot characters alone? Can a city ruin and ennoble someone at the same time? How much loss must one person suffer before persistence becomes madness?

And what makes a stranger--in the face of death and debt and riots--keep his feet in one place?

“I’ve taken care of enough feet --these characters are my attempt to reach the rest of the body, the mind,” says the foot doctor. “Most health problems people have make their way down to the feet eventually. And the problems of society make their way down to people on the bottom. That’s my world view.”

Young New Yorker Had a Steady Hand

Step back.

Back 31 years, to the fall afternoon when a newly minted podiatrist drove into Compton for the first time.

He was a New Yorker, the second child of a couple who moved out of a Brooklyn neighborhood when black people moved in. Young Martin Marks played stickball with the other Jews and some Italians, gambled and doodled whenever he could. With his steady hand, he could reproduce pictures from comic books so accurately that his friends thought he was tracing.

He attended Long Island University, indifferent to every subject but the Vietnam War. Friends thought he should be an artist, but podiatry school provided a surer way to avoid the draft. When his father’s Navy job shifted west to Long Beach, Marks decided to go to San Francisco to attend the California College of Podiatric Medicine.

He nearly fainted at his first hammertoe surgery, but soon settled in. After graduation in 1968, Marks looked for a place to practice in Southern California, near his parents.

“Go to the black areas,” a podiatrist friend from San Diego advised. “They have the worst feet.” Marks thought the statement was racist, but, eventually, he would learn the doctor had a point. Poor people--of all colors--work menial jobs requiring them to stand for hours at a time. And their jobs allow them to afford only cheap, ill-fitting shoes that hurt their feet.

Marks looked around before finding an office on Compton Boulevard, which was being abandoned by white retailers unnerved by the riots and the influx of blacks. Marks, despite warnings, bought it. A sign went up above the front door. “Foot Marks,” it still reads.

By his third day, he had his first patient. By his third month, he was a sensation. Word was that the new foot doctor could handle the worst ingrown toenails and would show patience with slow-paying clients. Business surged. He hired his mother to run the office while he tended to dozens of patients a day. Feeling flush, the doctor leased a brand new convertible Cadillac, wore handmade suits and bought Lakers and Kings season tickets.

“He’s a natural at surgery, and so people came from outside Compton to see him,” says Dr. Mike Cohen, a podiatrist in Los Angeles. “His hands are a gift.”

Marks sponsored youth sports teams in Compton, but otherwise held himself apart from the community. In 1979, the podiatrist, then accompanied by his new wife and baby daughter, bought a $400,000 house on a half-acre on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Marks added a deck and hosted parties. In one part of the house, he created an entertainment area he called Le Club Foot, with a bar, brass doors he salvaged from a bank lobby and pictures of Coretta Scott King, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Marks’ own mother as a baby.

The podiatrist weathered one financial storm. During the mid- and late 1970s, as the federal and state governments’ health plans for the poor diminished, Marks received less in reimbursements. But he quickly made up the difference by taking on new patients provided by the carpenters and shipbuilders unions. The shipbuilders gave Marks a nickname: Footsie. It stuck.

By the mid-1980s, says Marks, “I thought the money and good times were going to be endless.”

1990s Bring Bad Times to City

Step down.

Descend the hill from the Palos Verdes Peninsula and watch as a new decade--the 1990s--comes to Compton, as a city and its foot doctor are laid low.

First his wife left him. Then his mother died unexpectedly. Marks was devastated, left without companionship and office help. He was no good at paperwork.

Compton was changing, too. Marks lost patients to crack cocaine, and friends to gang cross-fire. Addicts broke into the office looking for anything they could sell for the next fix. By 1990, the unions, with less work to do in a struggling city, moved to Long Beach and took his most reliable patients with them. In 1991, Dominguez Valley Hospital, where he performed surgeries and ate lunch, closed and left him estranged from other doctors.

His sister, Lynne Craig, a retired advertising agent from Encino, would call every few months. “I would say, ‘Get out. Get out while you still can,’ ” she recalls. “He was near Torrance. Why couldn’t he move, set up a new practice, keep making a living?”

His friend and podiatry school classmate, Dr. Eric Hubbard, suggested a move to Long Beach. Marks said he was loyal to Compton and its people: They had paid for his cars, his suits and his house. Didn’t he owe it to the town to stick it out?

At the same time, Marks admitted to himself that fixing 20 bunions a month for 20 years had taken a toll. Worried, doctors and old friends dropped by to check on him.

“You see weird, disfiguring things in feet,” said Hubbard. “If you’re not careful, it can change you.”

Foot Characters Are Born

Step up.

Don’t shrink from a challenge. In the 1992 riots, Marks’ office was untouched by fire, even as businesses all around him were burned or looted. But the doctor wasn’t sure he deserved such special treatment. He had been playing footsie with Compton for all these years, he decided, with one foot in the community and the other one out.

In all his years in podiatry, Marks had never given up his doodling. On bills and business cards, he sketched cartoon characters, usually shaped as feet. Young people liked the cartoons, and there had been plenty of children among the riots’ arsonists and looters. Could he touch their hearts with his feet?

Working in his study, he sketched out six characters, each of which bore a message about a different vice. He called them the Six Soles: Toe-Morrow, a procrastinator; Tipsy Toe, the alcoholic; Toe-Bacco, a smoker; Lot-toe Losers, a gambler; Blue-Toe, a drug addict; and Toe Bo the Hobo.

It was as if the doctor had put all of Compton’s intractable problems into these cartoon feet, so that they might be seen clearly and made to go away.

By the end of 1992, he had shown off his group of characters, dubbed “The New Feet on the Street,” to the City Council. To create unity in the community, he organized a 5K run and rally at Compton Community College under the motto, “Toe-gether We Can Make It Better.” The run led to invitations to speak at schools and libraries.

For these presentations, he created a slide show featuring the characters and recorded a hip-hop “New Feet on the Street” ballad full of anti-drug and anti-gang messages. He himself played Dr. Footsie, a peace-loving doctor, equal parts Mr. Rogers and Jerry Lewis.

Street theater was next. He became a fixture at anti-violence protests and public health rallies. He staged a mock funeral for Toe-Bacco, a smoking foot, at Angeles Abbey Memorial Cemetery. Using canvas, a motorized bicycle and a fire hose for the shoelace, he built the shoe float that he has driven in parades in Compton, Watts and South-Central over the last eight years.

“It got to the point where we would go around town and everyone would yell and give him a standing ovation,” says Sylvester Gibbs, 76, a retired crane operator who accompanied Marks in a yellow Dodge van. “He’s like a rock star.”

The adulation was a tonic after the difficult years. Vans, the Santa Fe Springs-based shoe company, met with him about putting his characters on their shoes. A documentary filmmaker named Donny Miller began following him around. Marks created a nonprofit corporation called Footsteps, and dreamed of going national with an anti-drug, stay-in-school program.

“He got more and more interested in his performance work, and let podiatry fall more and more by the wayside,” Cohen says. “I don’t think he thought about how he would pay the bills.”

He Takes Anti-Drug Message to Schools

Step close.

Listen to the foot doctor, boys and girls of Compton’s Optimal Christian Academy. “My name is Dr. Footsie,” he says. “My real name is Mr. Marks.”

The third-, fourth- and fifth-graders laugh as he runs a slide show full of foot characters. They dance as the doctor raps on the dangers of drugs. They listen closely as he says that if they smoke weed and smell of it, they will be “unattractive to members of the opposite foot.”

“He’s the coolest guy,” says Lauren Phillips, 9. “And he’s funny. He makes me think it’s silly to be violent and take drugs.”

Dr. Footsie and Mr. Marks. One half of the personality still makes an impact, even as Mr. Marks, trying to hold up a community, slowly loses his footing. A city’s affections do not bring money. His nonprofit never went national. His health has suffered. In January, lung problems kept him in bed and out of the schools for a month.

Marks has all but given up practicing medicine. He comes to the office every morning but is lucky to see two patients by noon, when he heads out to work the streets. He hasn’t done a surgery in more than a year. He failed to renew the license on his X-ray machine. When Marta Flores and her husband, Nigel, showed up at his door recently, asking the doctor to look at Nigel’s infected foot, Marks couldn’t be bothered. “The doctor has quit,” he said.

With virtually no income, he relies on handouts. Doris Glenn, the owner of the barbecue place across the street, feeds him. Friendly print shop owners make the foot stickers and trading cards he hands out to kids for free.

He is a strange charity case. He still drives the yellow Mercedes, though it is 20 years old and unreliable. He still owns the giant house, but twice in four years he has refinanced it just to pay the mortgage and his bills. The house is falling apart. Cobwebs cover the front door. A pothole makes the driveway nearly impossible to navigate. Le Club Foot is dusty and dark.

Marks still has his license. When he is hard up for cash, he drops by the Rest Haven Board and Care to cut toenails. He performs at birthday parties. Old friends have given up trying to persuade him to return to medicine.

Busy in Compton, Marks has lost touch with his family. His sister is ailing. He spends his days with children but rarely speaks with his own daughter, 25. The foot characters, says Jimmy Hayes, a retired boxer and community activist, “have become his children.”

Marks says he will never leave. He believes that somehow he will find a way to fund a nonprofit so he can give up podiatry altogether and make foot characters his business. Until that day comes, he will do whatever he can to conserve cash and stay out on the street and in the schools.

He sold his lone investment, a rental property in Long Beach. He skips meals. He doesn’t date. He has stopped cutting his hair. As cash runs short, he could cancel his health insurance, he says.

“I could sell the house,” he says. “I could sleep in the car or the office, though I had to refinance that, too. It’s cheap. I’ll put everything on the line. Maybe it’s crazy, but money or not, I’ve never been happier than I am right now.”

Over the last 31 years, the churches along his stretch of Compton Boulevard have changed pastors, the cemetery has switched owners and other stores have come and gone. The print shop even burned down.

But the podiatrist has stayed.

“He takes things about Compton personally,” says Glenn, the barbecue restaurant owner. “He has felt all the blows.”

So step carefully. Keep your feet in the same place long enough, and you may be stuck there, for good and bad.

“All he has left,” says Glenn, “is Compton.”