A Shining Past : Lee Calton,82, the shoeshine man at Burbank Airport,
has buffed more than a millionpairs, including those belonging to
early Hollywood stars, politiciansand gangsters. Today, his isa dying
profession.
April 18, 1994 | JOHN M. GLIONNA | TIMES STAFF WRITER
BURBANK — Sometimes, during the depressingly long stretches between
customers, Lee Calton sitsin the big maroon highchair at the Burbank
Airport and reminisces about the fast-stepping, spit-polished heyday
of the professional shoeshine.
Of course, that was back in the 1930s and 1940s, when Hollywood's
elite--the actors and producers, directors and agents, gangsters and
politicians, athletes and jazz singers--all stepped up toCalton's
chair at Rothschild's haberdashery in Beverly Hills for a five-minute
shine and a strong dose of street smarts.
His regulars were the likes of Bugsy Siegel, Al Capone, Mickey Cohen,
Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Groucho Marx, Nelson Rockefeller and Cecil
B. De Mille--well-dressedmen who, like Calton, appreciated the subtle
aesthetics of the freshly polished shoe.
They were spanking, elegant times when Calton entertained customersby
snapping an old cotton polish rag in perfect rhythm to the high-blown
jazz and Big Band tunes that played on his portable radio--laughing
and scatting and making people smile and shake their heads.
At night, when he wasn't working the door at the old Beverly Hills
Tropics nightclub, a lean and wiry Calton would himself step out on
the town, dressed in his dapper fedora, double-breasted suit, gold
jewelry and the finest pair of brown-toned leather beauties money
could buy.
On the wall behind his shine stand at the airport hangs a gallery of
old black-and-white photographs showing a much younger Calton in his
Cotton Club days, sharing a table with Nat King Cole--always natty,
always smiling, unmistakably full of life.
"Ha! Ha! Ha! I sure spent some money in those days," he says, flashing
the tattoo on his left forearm, the faded image of a nude woman coiled
in a champagne glass.
But at age 82, Calton can no longer make a living from the job that
bought him half a dozen new cars and paid for his one-story dream
house. Still, he arrives each day at 5:45 a.m. at the airport barber
shop--not for what little he earns from the occasional $2 shine, but
as a way to hold onto the cologne-scented atmosphere of the swirling
shoe wax, saddle soap and friendly banter he loves.
Now, Calton gazes out the shop window and wonders how his lifelong
profession became a vanishing job--how his footlight parade of
cigar-smoking customers dwindled to the chosen few still willing to
sit for a shine and take an unhurried look back atyesterday.
"Look at that!" Calton scoffs, pointing to a group of passersby."All
you see today are sneakers. I tell you, men have just forgotten how to
dress. They just don't care as much about their looks like theyused
to--with all these ponytails and earrings. The day of the well-dressed
man is dead."
The result has put professionals like Calton right out of business.
Once a staple of barber shops, men's stores and fine hotels in
post-World War II America, shoe shining is a disappearing trade.
While statistics are hard to come by, shine stands like the
wood-and-leather booth that Calton runs have become nearly extinct,
except for airports and an occasional city street as leather hasgiven
way to cheap plastic and other synthetics that don't need shining.
"The shoeshine profession is like a dinosaur, it's dying out before
our eyes," said Jack Lavin, a spokesman for the Hotel and Restaurant
Employees InternationalUnion.
"The reason is that America's dresscode has changed. Now it's gym
shoes and blue jeans. The shiny-shoes-and-creased-pants look is gone.
Gone forever. And the shoeshine is sure to follow."
Like a lone relay runner, Calton hasno one to whom he can pass his
shoeshine brush.
"Nobody wants this job," he says."Kids today, they think it's
demeaning to even think about shining somebody else's shoes."
Nevertheless, Calton's artful, polish-blackened hands still go proudly
about their business day after day, a pair of wrinkled experts that
over70 years have known their way around more than a million pairs of
shoes.
"I'm going to keep shining shoes until the day I die, or my profession
dies off," he says with asigh. "Whichever comes first."
As he has since 1971, Calton caters to a handful of loyal businessman
at Burbank Airport--his soft-bristled brush gliding around a curved
heel, the cloth ragsnapping across yet another pair of tasseled
loafers.
Nobody knows shoes like Calton. Standing at his chair, the
white-haired Louisiana native spouts littlewisdoms that have taken a
career to compile: that Italian-made leather is the best bargain on
the planet, that black wears better thanbrown and that it takes a
really special polish to beat the baking heat of the western desert.
"Leather will last indefinitely if you take care of it," he says.
"Yesiree, saddle soap is the closest thing to real animal oil that man
has ever devised. Keep a little rubbed into your shoes and they'll
last you forever, as if the animal were still living."
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