Shoe Shine, Sir? Ten Cents

By kiki

A few years ago, Connie said that she and Linda (our daughter) were going shopping-shopping at the local mall; I said okay, but to be careful, that there were too many crazy people out there looking to steal her purse, or worse yet, looking to steal her "steal me?

Why would anybody want to steal me?" she asked me "for ransom, and I ain't paying no damn ransom, so be careful!" I replied. She called me a sick puppy and asked me what I would do while she was gone. I didn't have plans of doing anything, but after she left, I started getting bored. Then a bright light went off at the top of my head. Shine your shoes, dude; they sure need shining, so I brought out the seven pairs I used the most, got my shine box (a cardboard box), and started shining shoes.

As I was shining a pair of Florsheim, I remembered my days as a shoeshine boy when we lived in Simons. In the late 1940s, on summer weekends, I would walk with my shine box to the local pool hall to look for customers' "shoe shine, sir, ten cents" sometimes, I had to bring the price down to seven cents as the competition was fierce. But business was good on those weekends as the older guys dressed to the nines needed an excellent spit shine on their shoes to go with their sharkskin thread.

Ten shines at ten cents a shines. I would earn more than the twenty-eight cents it cost me (14 cents for a round trip bus ticket and 14 cents theater ticket) to go to East Los Angeles to watch western movies at the Royale Theater…. Life was much simpler back then!!

31Joe Adame and 30 others

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