Out in Greene County, Iowa

A new source of saddle shoes: Goodbye Bass, hello Muffy's! Our feet are happy again!

By CHUCK OFFENBURGER
January 31, 2005
COOPER, IOWA

You may recall that right before Christmas in a column here, I was celebrating the 10th anniversary of our “Back in the Saddle” campaign. In that late, great effort, I had used my column in the Des Moines Register to rally Iowans in helping me convince G.H. Bass & Co. to put the classic black & white saddle shoes back into production again.

Alas, the recent anniversary turned into more of a requiem than a celebration. I had just learned that Brown Shoe Company, based in St. Louis, which had bought production and marketing rights to Bass shoes, had discontinued production of saddle shoes.

It didn’t matter that 675 Iowans had ordered $48,000 worth of saddle shoes from Bass in our campaign in ’94. When stories about that circulated in the East, the Bass reps going to the New York City Shoe Show wore the new saddle shoes and got orders from dealers for 10,000 pairs. And over the next four years, the company sold 4,000 pairs in Iowa alone.

But no more Bass saddle shoes, Brown Shoe Company said in late December.

What ho! There is now good news!

It arrived in an unexpected e-mail on January 19 from Tom Carter, who describes himself as “a 40-something biologist living in Georgia.” He added that he “grew up in the Midwest, and I have been wearing saddles since I can remember.”

Carter kindly said he has “enjoyed reading about your saddle shoe evangelism,” and then really made my day. “In case you have not already found them, you don’t need Bass,” he wrote. “You need Muffy’s, which you can read about at www.muffys.com. They understand the need for saddle shoes when you want them.”

Is this Heaven? No, it’s Manning, Oregon.

That’s where last week I caught up by phone with Margaret “Muffy” Marshall, 51, and her husband Allen Marshall, 56, partners in Muffy’s Enterprises. Manning is a town of “maybe 200” located in northern Oregon in “a spectacular valley” between Portland and the Coastal Range of mountains.

There, the Marshalls have what their Internet site says “is most likely the largest retail inventory of saddle shoes in the world!”

How many pairs?

“It varies,” said Allen, “but we carry about 3,500 pairs in inventory that are our regular stock for sale. We’ve got more in our personal collection that are not for sale.”

Among the selections at Muffy's Enterprises in Manning, Oregon, reachable at www.Muffys.com They have dozens of different styles of saddle shoes for men and women.

Their prices range from $39 to $149.

Muffy’s has saddle shoes in dozens of different styles. They have bought out existing stock from some manufacturers. They have also started manufacturing their own line, re-creating styles from the past, with the brand name of “Muffy’s” for women’s shoes, “Stewart Marshall” for their men’s line. (The “Stewart” there is Muffy’s maiden name.)

So while you might find a pair of saddle shoes there that are actually 40 to 50 years old, maybe even older, you can also buy replicas of the older styles that have been manufactured recently.

There are the original white-soled shoes with the black & white uppers. There are the traditional orange crepe soles – actually they are “coral” colored, I now learn. There are the brown & white saddles that became popular in World War II when the black dye for the leather was hard to find. There are many other colors available – red & white, brown & beige and many more. You can buy saddle shoes with ''rounded toe boxes'' for extra comfort. You can buy funky high-heeled saddle shoes.

Even more fun, at their show room in Oregon, Muffy’s has a collection of priceless saddle shoes – Muffy herself has a pair once owned and worn by Marilyn Monroe – and other saddle shoe memorabilia.

There you can learn the history of saddle shoes, which apparently made their debut in 1906.

Spalding, the sporting goods company, claims it made the “original saddle oxford” then, as “a gym shoe” It came with “an overlaying saddle to give additional strength at the point of stress,” according to an old Spalding ad the Marshalls have in their records. Allen said he has seen photos from the 1920s with saddle shoes being worn for tennis, field hockey, fencing and badminton.

Students liked the shoes so much they started wearing them as street shoes, too. “This presented problems because the gym sole collected dirt which would later be deposited in buildings,” the ad says. “Spalding then went to an automotive brake lining manufacturer to obtain a high quality rubber sole that would effectively stop on a gym floor. Nothing was said about color. From this came the exceptionally high quality and often imitated color of the Spalding Coral sole.”

Among other memorabilia, the Marshalls also have “stacks of magazines, books, college yearbooks and old photographs that have people wearing saddle shoes in them,” Muffy said. “We’ve got a collection of clothing that people have traditionally worn with saddle shoes – like Pendleton woolens, cheerleading outfits and collegiate styles. We’ve also got a big doll collection with all the dolls wearing saddle shoes.”

My goodness, I said to them, this isn’t just a business – it’s a major tourist attraction!

They do get visitors, they said. The Marshalls and two part-time employees conduct the Muffy’s business in a 2,000-square-foot commercial building. One part of it is their retail showroom, the other side is the warehouse.

Who are these people, and do they wear saddle shoes themselves?

“We both wear saddle shoes every single day,” said Muffy, “because we can.”

She is a retired nurse, a native of southern California. Besides doing shoes, Allen is also a real estate broker who came to Oregon from New Jersey 30 years ago.

Their fascination with saddle shoes goes back to their youth, when they’d wear them to school. “Part of the excitement every year was choosing what kind of saddle shoes you were going to get for going back to school,” Muffy said.

They kept wearing them as adults – in fact, they started collecting them – but then began running into the same thing so many of us have. The manufacturers who were making saddle shoes were dropping like flies, or occasionally pulling the saddles out of production.

“In the ’90s, we were really getting frustrated and not being able to find saddle shoes,” Allen said. “It was getting so difficult that we said, ‘Well, maybe there’s a niche business opportunity here for us.’ ”

Then in 1996, “an antique dealer who is a friend of ours acquired a warehouse full of shoes from a manufacturer, Karl Shoes, that had gone out of business,” Allen continued. “Our friend was telling us about this, that he had a building with 20,000 pairs of shoes that had been made from the 1930s to the mid ’70s. When we found out that a fair number of those were saddle shoes, we told him we’d buy all of the saddles he could find. We wound up getting somewhere between 400 to 600 pairs.”

Muffy said the shoes they purchased “were incredible – new and old stock – such a pristine collection.”

That and, even more important, the emergence of the Internet enabled them to go into the saddle shoe business.

“The Internet had an enormous impact on us,” Allen said. “When you have this kind of small, niche business, you’ve got to have a much different kind of exposure than you can get in a storefront. The Internet allows us to communicate worldwide. We get orders and hear from people all across the country and around the world. And it’s growing by leaps and bounds.”

Things really took off after the attacks on the U.S. on September 11, 2001.

“You probably read about how there seemed to be a return to traditional things after that,” said Muffy, “and we sure saw it in our business.”

Their busy season, they notice, now begins in late summer as the start of school is nearing, and continues on toward Christmas.

“One thing we’ve noticed is the number of schools going back to requiring uniforms for students,” Muffy said. “A lot of them are getting saddle shoes to go with those uniforms.”

They also benefited from the hit TV show “Gilmore Girls” on the Warner Brothers network, in which one of the main characters wore saddle shoes as a prep school student in New England. In fact, the show’s producers ordered 75 pairs of saddle shoes from Muffy’s, just for use in that show.

When they recently came out with the red & white saddle – for men as well as women – “we’ve sent a lot of them to Harvard University,'' said Muffy. ''The men of Harvard are wearing them out there. They're 'the Crimson,' you know.''

They said the states they ship the most saddle shoes to are Georgia, Florida, New York and New Jersey. But, up ’til now, I’ve been sending all you Iowans to G. H. Bass & Co. for your saddle shoes, so we’ll see how we Iowans rank as Muffy’s customers a year or so from now.

“It’s interesting, we’ll suddenly start getting a lot of orders from one city, and it always makes us wonder what’s going on there,” said Allen. “In the past couple of years, we’ve shipped dozens and dozens of pairs of saddle shoes to people in Scranton, Pennsylvania. And so far, no one’s mentioned anything except that they found us on the Internet.”

Tom Carter, the Georgian who steered me to all this, said he “discovered Muffy’s several years ago when I was trying to find a pair of black & white saddles as a present for my wife. We were living in Massachusetts at the time, and I could not find a single local store that carried saddle shoes. I decided to see if I could find something on the Internet. I did a quick search for ‘saddle shoes’ and was surprised to discover Muffy’s and their amazing selection. My wife soon had a brand spanking shiny new pair of her own.”

He added that in his “late-night Internet surfing, I also learned about you and the 1994 Bass buy. I was impressed by your determination to get people into saddles and have checked back every so often to see what other saddle shoe revolutions you may be leading.”

So, for Tom Carter and all you others in the flock, here it is: Goodbye Bass.

Hello, Muffy’s.

Our feet will be happy again.