Angela Mapes Turner

The shoes were smooth, coffee-bean-brown leather. By miracle of optical illusion, their rounded toes made my long, narrow, size-10 feet look downright dainty, or so I liked to think. Their kitten heels made me feel feminine without adding unnecessary height.

They could go with nearly anything, anywhere, and they did – until that fateful April day when the heel on my left shoe broke.

I hand them to Chuck Bolinger of Chuck’s Foot Support with little hope for their revival.

Besides the broken heel, the toes are scuffed, and mud mars the soles. I’ve nearly worn through the leather on the back of the right shoe where my driving foot rests on the floor of my car.

The shoes haven’t aged gracefully, and my careless treatment hasn’t helped. But Bolinger has seen a lot of shoes in 46 years in the shoe-repair business.

They aren’t Ferragamo, but they’re well-made. I’ve never had shoes repaired – typical of my generation, Bolinger tells me – but the fact that the shoes are among my favorites is reason enough to heed the motto of the Shoe Service Institute of America: “If the shoe fits, repair it.”

“It’s one of the cheapest repairs,” he tells me, turning the pumps over in his hands. “Some of the simplest things can make that shoe usable for another two years.”

Bolinger doesn’t repair as many shoes as 15 years ago, instead rounding out his business with custom orthotics. A certified pedorthist, he makes physician-prescribed orthotics and shoe modifications for better foot health.

But the recession, he says, has more people looking to shoe repairs – often less than $10 – instead of shelling out for new footwear.

An economy much like this one originally drove Bolinger to the shoe-repair business.

His father, Norman, owned a shoe-repair store in Fort Wayne and had learned the trade from a German immigrant. Bolinger began working in his father’s store at age 11.

But as a young adult in the early 1970s, he wanted to be an electrician, until an economic downturn made construction jobs scarce.

“Housing took a horrible dip,” he said. “We didn’t have much work.”

His father helped him get back into the family business. In 1973, Bolinger bought an existing store in Georgetown Square on East State Boulevard.

In the years that followed, he and his wife, Chris, a nurse at Parkview Behavioral Health, raised two children. Chris helps in the store with specialty sewing jobs.

About 12 years ago, he moved his store to its current location in Stellhorn Village.

Awards, including a large silver trophy, line the walls of the small front room among boxes of shoes, packages of shoelaces and insoles. Bolinger won the Shoe Service Institute of America’s Silver Cup competition in 2005.

Most of the store’s square footage is devoted to the workshop, where a 30-year-old workhorse of a machine that polishes, sands and buffs takes up almost an entire wall.

On a shelf above the machine, women’s heels rest next to new white athletic shoes and scuffed cowboy boots. Bolinger estimates he works on 40 to 50 pairs of shoes each day, with the occasional handbag or luggage repair.

Some repairs, such as my brown heels, are quicker than others. Bolinger uses the large machine to sand down the heel and base of the shoes – not just my broken one, but both.

“Whatever you do with one, you have to do with the other,” he says.

Factories crank out shoes with heels made of a hard, precut plastic, but those heels are noisy and sometimes slippery, so many people get them replaced with rubber even if they aren’t damaged, Bolinger says.

Bolinger doesn’t nail the rubber to the heel; instead, he uses a vinyl adhesive to attach the rubber pieces to my heels, and a hydraulic press applies about 80 pounds of pressure to glue on the soles.

The days of shoes made of basic rubber and leather construction are gone, and the ways of repairing modern shoes have also changed. Bolinger believes shoe repair isn’t so much a lost art as an evolving one.

“That’s the only way you can stay in this business,” he said. “Stay current on new products, new techniques.”

He tries to operate the business with factory-like efficiency. If he has a lot of women’s heels to repair, he tries to do them at the same time. Same with men’s heels, or the pointed tips of women’s shoes.

But each shoe gets an individual touch, he says, brushing my shoes with a polish that restores their coffee-bean glow.