Felix the Cobbler Heals Broken Soles

Christos Soillis, alias Felix, poised the cowboy boot in midair as he examined the sole. "Shoemaking!" he snorted. "The worst job you can do."

He chuckled as he said this, however, and proffered a bandaged hand for inspection. "See this hand?" he questioned. "My knife accidentally slipped last week. It kept me awake all night."

Soillis, who runs the Felix Shoe Repair Shop underneath Joe's Pizza, has been fixing shoes since the age of 11; he is now 59. Originally from Sparta, Greece, he has been living in this country for the past 13 years. He still speaks with a pronounced accent. Felix does not read English; scribbled notes written to himself lie about his shop, "bouriges kori bourtgaks."

"My father," said Felix, "was a farmerman. I never was, though. For six years I went to school to learn my trade--three years of design, three years of making shoes. My goal was to graduate and make shoes for the government, for the military. In Greece, however, there was no program to do this. Instead I opened my own shop. The farmers, the shepherds, would come down from the mountains and I made them shoes to last forever. For $10--in your money--I made them shoes of the best leather and rubber that would last forever."

Felix does not make shoes anymore. He quit about 12 years ago because he was losing money. As he spoke, he wistfully fingered the thick cowhide he once used to make soles, and conceded that factories can now cut 20 such soles in a few minutes, whereas the same process takes him all day.

Though he acknowledged the greater efficiency of shoe factories, Felix condemned them for the low quality of their output.

"Factories make shoes easy, but not good," he said. He cited the example of some Capezio dance shoes sold on Mass. Ave., which were of such poor construction that their heels came off before they were even worn. "I had to tack the heels back on a dozen or more pairs," he said. There was a little gleam of triumph in his eye.

Since he quit making shoes--with the exception of a few sandals here and there--the focus of Felix's business has shifted to shoe repair; he also sells accessory leather good such as purses and belts on the side, as well as some rather unique footwear. For $5, you can buy a pair of bicentennial red-white-and-blue-saddle shoes, for example. The reason they go for so little, Felix explained, is that trying to get rid of them."

Felix estimated that he repairs about 40 pairs of shoes a week. He likes to do ladies' shoes the best, he said, because they are the easiest to mend.

At one point, he was in the process of slicing off the heel of a massive cowboy boot. "Men's shoes," he said. "They take a long time. This one here needs the soles cut down and new ones built up. It'll take four or five hours." Felix said he would charge $15 for the job.

Sighing, he scratched his swarthy face thoughtfully. "My children--I would not want this life for them. Better that they should sweep the streets than be shoemakers. I must put in 70, 80 hours a week, and I make $100 a week. That's about $1 an hour."

Sitting in his quaint workroom, replete with ancient Singer sewing machines, an endless series of Neolite rubber heels, and large rusting old machinery, Felix seems something of an anachronism, one of the few true remaining craftsmen. To hear him talk is at once poignant and glad-dening. For even as he acknowledges his anachronistic situation--"Nobody wants shoemakers anymore"--he would not want to do anything else. He genuinely likes his work.

"At the end of the week, I go home I'm so happy, I might as well be a millionaire," he said. "That's a stupid thing, I know but that's the pleasure."