If there was an M.D. for shoemaking, Michael Summers would have it. Every customer at his store — Jim the Shoe Doctor, located on 458 East 11th Avenue — is treated with care and a surgical attention to detail.
Over the course of his 40-year career, Summers has had a multitude of teachers. One of Summers’ earliest teachers, Harold Stokes, would be insulted if someone called him a cobbler. To cobble could mean to repair shoes, but also to throw something together with little or no skill, something no self-respecting shoemaker would do.
“I got the blessing to be able to learn from these different people, because a lot of people, they don’t have that,” Summers said.
Summers has owned Jim The Shoe Doctor since 2000, almost a century after the original Jim opened the store in 1903. The store is deceptively massive, with a sprawling workshop and a lobby filled with any shoe-related item imaginable.
He started working on shoes at 16 in the ‘80s, when his best friend’s dad offered him a job at My Shoe Repair in Lane County. Less than a year after being taken in, the owner told him he couldn’t afford to keep him on.
“And he says, ‘You’ll never find another job in shoe repair.’ Within a couple days, I had another job,” Summers said.
Summers found himself owning the current iteration of Jim the Shoe Doctor after 20 years of making shoes and a few odd jobs in between. Through the six different owners of the store, it has never passed down to a family member. The challenge is finding a replacement with enough dedication to shoemaking.
“The interest in shoe repair is non-existent, because most people don’t want to do anything that has to be a craftsman-style job. You know, most everybody wants to go and they want to hit a keyboard or they want to talk to somebody and make money. They don’t want to actually have to do something,” Summers said.
The store remains busy despite a lack of interest in learning about the craft. Summers says they could have two to three times the amount of business if he didn’t have to play the supervisor role.
“It’s not hard, at the root of most things, they’re not hard,” he said. “It just takes some common knowledge, some manual dexterity and the willingness to do a good job. But it’s really hard to find people that can put those things together.”
Finding a replacement is tricky. An important part of a shoemaker is having a knack for the biomechanics of shoes, something a lot of people and even shoemakers don’t have. Summers says the best part of his job is the orthopedic work. He does this for his clients who need a variety of customizations for their shoes.
“I’ll have a customer that will come in and say, ‘You can never quit. You can never stop doing this because I can’t take my shoes anywhere else,’” Summers said.
Summers has acquired this customer base, “by treating people right — that’s about it. Doing a good job for them, standing behind what you do and always trying to go above and beyond,” he said.
A pair of lasts — the wooden foot you would build the shoe around — dating back to 1955 and 19th-century children’s boots with stitching so fine on such high quality leather it couldn’t be recreated today are just a few relics littered around the store. Summers clearly has an interest in the history of shoes and a fascination with the art of making them.
“We’ve put ourselves into a really bad situation because a lot of these people couldn’t figure it out if their life depended on it,” Summers said. Not many people still have the respect for shoes that Summers has.
One of the store’s employees, Shoe Repairer and “Zipper Queen” Sonja Scannell, said she first got involved with the store after she was held up at gunpoint at her old job. This was her wake up call. She would switch from working at a Dari Mart to working in shoes. She used her experience sewing clothing for her daughter to get her foot in the door and Summers hired her seven years ago.
“I’m almost 50 years old, so I guess my fear is that this won’t be around forever. So I feel really lucky that I’m doing kind of an old school trade, like a mom and pop shop, and you just don’t see that anymore,” Scannell said.
The most alluring part of the store is the people. Summers himself takes on every client to the fullest extent and makes sure to provide them with exceptional care. Besides Summers, the employees clearly care about their craft and want to see the store succeed.
Jim the Shoe Doctor is open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
