Gerald Clark, Canadian journalist, takes on a story ~

After the second WWII when full-scale passenger service, by ship, resumed.  Ocean liners, which had carried hundreds of thousands of troops in jammed quarters during six years of war, were now refitted on a luxury scale.

Clark's assignment was to travel from Montreal to Southampton on the Canadian Pacific's Empress of Scotland, and return.  He was to write about the kind of people who now enjoyed peacetime travel.  One man's story never left him.

A man called "Boots" had worked all his life shining shoes--women's shoes, men's shoes, children's shoes.  During the war, he did it ashore.  Back at sea, he was happily shining shoes again "while the ship rolled and creaked."

The journalist followed "Boots" night after night as he picked up and cleaned the footwear that waited outside many cabin doors.  "Not once did I think of asking whether he knew tedium.

It was plain that "Boots" was as fascinated by the one shoe now in his palm as he must have been tens of thousands of pairs ago. "

"Look here," he said, pointing to the heel. "You see where the right side is worn much more than the other side.  The man who wears this shoe has no fears of life."

"How did "Boots" know?  He just knew, that's all.  Experience had given him this insight, so he could judge the character of an individual--an individual he never met in person--by the way the heel or the sole sloped.  "Boots" analyzed every piece of footwear this way.  He administered a magnificent shine.  He was terribly proud of his work and he was never bored."

~ Gerald Clark, NO MUD ON THE BACK SEAT, Memoirs of a reporter. Robert Davies Publishing, 1995.