He’s a Godfather of Sole

Seymour Fabrick moved slowly across the floor at the World Shoe Assn. expo in Las Vegas. After seven decades in the business, moving fast wasn’t in the cards.

The glittery high heels and sexy thong sandals didn’t catch his eye. On this day he was looking for survivors. Guys like Jack Berlin, 74, who has been selling shoes for nearly half a century.

“I said, ‘Was that Seymour Fabrick who just came by?’ ” a smiling Berlin said, pumping Fabrick’s hand when the 88-year-old salesman stopped by his display booth. “This was worth coming to the show for.”

Fabrick is a reminder of better days. Days when his Vogue Shoe Co. still operated 10 manufacturing plants in the Los Angeles area. Days when a dozen suppliers made heels in California. Days before China became America’s favorite shoemaker.

Today, 98.5% of all shoes sold here are made overseas. Only a few closely held family businesses still produce women’s dress shoes, slip-ons and sandals in Los Angeles County. Even so, that makes the county one of the biggest hubs for shoe manufacturing in the United States.

The leaders include Magdesian Bros. Inc. in City of Industry, Tate Shoes of Sun Valley and Dezario Shoe Co. of North Hollywood. Then there’s Beverly Heels Inc., which put Fabrick back to work after Vogue Shoe was shuttered in 1991.

“They are the last of the Mohicans,” said Fawn Evanson, vice president of the American Apparel and Footwear Assn., an industry trade group based in Arlington, Va.

Like Fabrick, they keep selling, and looking for the market niche that will protect them from the tide of imports. A turnaround looks impossible. But survival, who knows? Some say it’s doable. Especially if you can quickly design, assemble and ship up-to-the-minute fashions to mail-order houses and retailers.

“I can develop the same day, the next day,” said Alex Kats, owner of J&A; Shoe Co. in Gardena, which makes the Callisto, Athenia Alexander and Lia Bijou brands. “Everything is speed.”

Some produce unusual widths and sizes. Dezario didn’t do so badly this summer with its thong sandals with a poufy flower at the toes; Nordstrom sold them in 10 colors for $89.95 a pair. Art Magdesian, whose dad and uncles launched Magdesian Bros. from an East L.A. garage 52 years ago, says he’s done well this year with his comfort shoes. “I don’t have those pointy toes at the feet that are going to hurt people,” he said.

Still, the spots of good news hardly reverse the sorry trend. U.S. production of women’s shoes plummeted 85% from 1995 to 2002. Census figures show that about 20 companies still were producing women’s nonathletic footwear in L.A. County as of 2001. Only two had more than 100 workers.

If anybody knows what a vibrant shoe industry really feels like, it’s Seymour Fabrick, who says that at one time he employed 800 workers and raked in $22 million in sales.

“We built a new industry here in California,” he said.

It’s not something you give up on easily.

At LAX recently, waiting to board a flight for the Las Vegas trade show, Fabrick showed off a photo of himself taken in 1932, when he first hit the road selling shoes for his uncle in Milwaukee. He wore a dapper three-piece suit -- just as he does today -- his 6-foot-2-inch frame leaning against a Model A that he bought for $165 and drove for 80,000 miles.

“I had dreams about selling a lot of shoes to big people, like J.C. Penney, Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck,” Fabrick said. “Those were the biggest people in the shoe business.”

On his travels, California intrigued him -- the bustle of San Francisco, with all its shoe stores, and the cobblers on Olvera Street in Los Angeles, turning out woven leather sandals that they called huaraches.

“The guys were hammering and pounding,” Fabrick said. “They were making crappy-looking shoes. But they were selling.

“Every time I came there, I would think about opening my own factory,” he said. So in 1941, with $500 to bankroll his future, he took the leap. He opened a shop on the third floor of a mostly empty office building in downtown L.A. where the rent was $15 a month.

Fabrick made a variety of styles, including shoes with a huarache-style top on a felt wedge or wooden platform. The Hollywood Skooters brand was born.

When war forced the rationing of leather, Fabrick produced shoes with cloth tops and wooden soles, hinged to bend. “I was the only guy making nonrationed shoes,” he said. “The thing took off.”

When the war ended, Fabrick hired many concentration camp survivors who had made their way to America, recalled Jerry Potashnick, 84, an account executive for Tate Shoes.

“He taught them how to make shoes,” Potashnick said.

Business boomed in the early 1950s. The Southland was setting trends in women’s shoe design. Fabrick opened a 50,000-square-foot plant in Monterey Park and a 25,000-square-foot factory and headquarters downtown. By 1960, he had 10 plants making 10,000 pairs of shoes a day, and 14 salesmen on the road.

Fabrick “helped every little shoe company that ever got started” in Los Angeles, said Evanson of the footwear association.

Nichan Srourian said Fabrick encouraged him to launch a business making plastic heels after he immigrated from Germany 25 years ago.

“He said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be your first customer.’ He was a major manufacturer here,” said Srourian, owner of Polyplex Plastics of North America Inc. in Sun Valley. “I had someone to rely on.”

But broad changes already were underway. Manufacturers began importing smart-looking women’s shoes from Italy and Brazil.

Then the dam broke.

“They discovered Asia,” Evanson said.

Fabrick, who was active in the now-defunct American Footwear Industries Assn. and later was its president, lobbied on behalf of domestic shoemakers.

“He would write to congressmen, he would write to newspapers, he would write to everyone about the evil that had fallen on domestic shoe factories,” Potashnick said.

But “every time you’d call on a retailer, it was, ‘We buy from China,’ ‘We buy from South America,’ ” Fabrick recalled.

As the manufacturing landscape was tilting, the retail arena also began to shift.

Independent retailers, which in the late 1970s accounted for half of all shoe sales in the U.S., began dying off in the face of competition from discounters such as Wal-Mart. Today they account for about 20% of sales, Evanson said.

By the late 1980s, Vogue Shoe was losing money; the bank curtailed Fabrick’s credit.

Finally, in 1991, Fabrick closed his remaining factories, laying off about 400 employees, including some who had worked for him for more than four decades.

“You couldn’t get any orders,” he said. “I was pretty sad.”

Today, Fabrick works mornings at Beverly Heels handling orders in a weary-looking office. In a small factory down a hallway, about 20 workers attach toe pieces to insoles, insert shoe linings and cement soles onto polyurethane wedges, turning out clogs, pumps and sandals.

Beverly Heels sells to only three mail-order companies now. That leaves Fabrick’s afternoons free for Ruthe, his wife of 69 years, who now suffers from Alzheimer’s. She once had 200 pairs of shoes in her closet. The longtime Beverly Hills residents raised a son and a daughter.

His office is cluttered with mementos, including pictures of himself with Jimmy Carter and with the late Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. A large picture of Franklin D. Roosevelt hangs on the wall, along with framed awards, certificates and articles.

A safe that once protected Vogue Shoe’s important papers stands with its door ajar. Shoe cases that now are too heavy for Fabrick to lug around are shoved alongside his desk.

Against one wall, a glass shelf holds dressy black high heels, colorful thong sandals and lime green slip-ons -- straw, with rubber soles. “I used to sell these for $1.25,” Fabrick said.

A fax machine behind the desk spits out a sheet of paper.

“Public Auction of the Littonian Shoe Co., Littlestown, Pa.” the missive announces. Sewing machines will be auctioned, it says, along with rubber cementers, eyeleting machines, buckle staplers, a box-forming machine and many other items.

“Another one,” said Garo Emirzian, Beverly Heels’ vice president, who has taken a seat in Fabrick’s office. “One by one the shoe factories close.

“It’s scary because if big companies like this close, the supplier closes too,” Emirzian said. “So where am I going to get my supplies?

“What we are doing now,” he added, “is surviving.”

But with his 89th birthday approaching, Fabrick figures there still are some shoes to be sold.

“I see shoes in my sleep,” he said.

He’s still very much the traveling salesman -- chatting up strangers, unfurling lively stories and steady as a stone when his flight to Las Vegas hits turbulence.

He faces additional challenges these days, having been slowed by a stroke and two heart attacks. At the Las Vegas expo, for example, the trade show floor seemed to stretch out forever.

“That’s a tough walk,” Fabrick admitted, as he made his way across it. But he has no plans to cut back his travels. “I’m going to work as long as Bob Hope,” he said.

The calls still come, just not as many.

“One guy called me just yesterday and said, ‘Seymour, are you still alive?’ ” Fabrick said.

Fabrick predicts that a few small domestic shoemakers will manage somehow to survive, but overall, “the shoe industry in the United States is finished,” he said.

Personally, Fabrick harbors no regrets. “I fulfilled my dream,” he said.

After he left the Las Vegas expo to catch a plane, exhibitors called him “a pioneer,” “the Godfather” and “a legend.” He is looked on so fondly for simple reasons, said Berlin, a sales rep from Atlanta. Fabrick weathered the travails of the industry -- and he keeps pressing onward.

“He’s a nice man who persevered,” Berlin said. “Which, in today’s world -- even in yesterday’s world -- is very unusual.”