Remembering Rose: Cline saved many soles in his lifetime
Editor’s note: In memory of longtime reporter Rose Post, who died this year, the Salisbury Post is reprinting some of her columns. This one first appeared in the paper on Aug. 23, 1992.
Buck Cline knows it’s an old joke.
“Need your sole saved?” he asks the customer pushing his shoes across the counter.
“Soles and heels, too,” the man says. “While you’re at it.” But he doesn’t smile.
Oh well. Buck doesn’t wait.
He’s been saving soles for half a century, and he doesn’t expect a knee-slapping raucous reaction to his moment of humor. This is standard stuff, part of the scenery, a shoemaker’s staple in trade, like the whirring of the finishing machine that’s as constant as a cat’s purr, like the unmistakable aromatic blend of leather and shoe polish, like the poster picture of an old-time shoemaker at a cobbler’s bench.
Come to think of it, that old-time shoemaker looks a lot like Buck, and he’s been smiling there on the wall nearly as long as Buck’s been running Cline’s Shoe Service at 110 E. Innes St. Buck doesn’t remember when he put it up. But he knows when he hung the big landscape and wild horses on the other wall. His son, Bucky, gave that to him when he was a student down at State.
And he knows when he got that certificate behind the counter. Back in the ’40s, when he was nationally registered as an orthopedic shoe serviceman because summertime meant polio. And polio meant he struggled trying to adjust braces and build up shoes so crippled children could walk.
“That was the most trying time,” he says. “All those kids had polio, and we didn’t even have an orthopedic doctor here. I spent half my time working on those braces and build-ups. The braces would come up to here” — he gestures toward his armpits — “and the kids would have to take their clothes off ...
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