 What’s the deal with the black & white saddle shoes?  Click here for the story of our farm in Greene County, Iowa. Here's looking at life at Simple Serenity Farm  Carla’s sister & brother-in-law Chris and Tony Woods, of Des Moines, were at the farm on Sunday, August 22, helping Carla do the lawn mowing and other yard work that we’ve struggled to keep up with lately, with all our medical appointments. The Woodses brought along their 18-month-old granddaughter Ari, who was a delight watching all the action from the porch with Chuck, catching up on her reading and then getting a moment on the lawn tractor seat! Click here for larger format Earlier photos in this series Iowa Hall of Pride netINS, Inc. Butler House on Grand B&B Sam's Barber Shop Douglas T. Bates III, Attorney KMA Radio's ''Chuck & Don Show'' Barack Obama story & coloring book The Monks of New Melleray Abbey RELATED LINKS About Offenburger.com Biographies Want to Reprint? Want Updates? ARCHIVES Chuck Offenburger's columns Christie Vilsack's columns Carla Offenburger's columns Carla's book reviews Jared Strong's columns Guest Columns The Simple Serenity Farm columns Farm Photos, 2006 - 2008 Our Iowa News Digest Along Our Way 
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 An important centennial simply must be hailed: 2006 is the 100th anniversary of saddle shoes! By CHUCK OFFENBURGER September 7, 2006 COOPER, IOWA A significant centennial is slipping past us far too quietly, so let’s start correcting that right here, right now.  When we totaled up that order from Iowa, we were ordering 675 pairs, with our checks adding up to more than $48,000. The Bass execs got so excited about it, they said they’d make those shoes and deliver them by December 24 “so those Iowans can wear them to Christmas Eve services.” They did, and we did. Meanwhile, the company took the first 10 pairs of saddle shoes they produced and put them on the feet of their sales force going to the annual New York City Shoe Show – where shoe merchants from across the nation and around the world come buy in bulk. They started telling the story about what we fashionable Iowans were doing, and Bass got orders for 10,000 more pairs from the store owners at the show. And I wound up on page 1 of the New York Times fashion section! Over the next five years, Bass Shoes sold 4,000 pairs of their saddle shoes in Iowa alone. One good customer was Tim Gallagher, now a columnist for the Sioux City Journal, who tells me he still wears his saddle shoes “probably 90 percent of the time at work. I give them a few days off during the winter, but that’s about it.” Gallagher was a young reporter and photographer for the Storm Lake Times in northwest Iowa back in 1992. “That’s when I began wearing them,” he said. “I bought my first pair from Brian Campbell at Tradehome Shoes in Storm Lake. And forgive me, but I didn’t know at the time that you wore them. At least I cannot recall that you were the stylish inspiration. The first day I wore them in Storm Lake, some heads were turning. I stopped by The Golden Clipper next door to our Times office, and my barber Bernie Onnen took one look down and said, ‘Oh, great shoes, Timmy! I see you’re following in Offenburger’s footsteps.’ Literally!” He recalls that “the kids at Alta High School used to love it when I visited their school. That was back in the mid 1990s when I had black curly hair and black horn-rimmed glasses. When I stopped in the gym – saddle shoes, glasses and all – they’d yell in unison, ‘Buddy Holly’s back!’ ” Gallagher says he “will admit to a journalistic bias” when it comes to the shoes. “Whenever I’m covering a story and I see someone in black & white saddles, I get a quote from them about something,” he said. “I figure anyone with that sense of style is someone worth quoting.” One person he sees wearing them a lot is Steve Allspach, a sportswriter for the Sioux City newspaper. “I kid Gallagher that I was on my third pair of saddle shoes, probably, before he was born,” Allspach said. He “bought my first pair in Waverly, Iowa, in the summer of 1963 when I was going to Wartburg College there. Bob Martin, my old college roommate and still the best buddy thing, and I got our saddles at the men's store there, Leuthold & Johnannsen's, I believe the name was. We got the urge and were envious when we saw some guys on the University of Northern Iowa campus in Cedar Falls wearing them.” Allspach recalls a fun part of the saddle shoe tradition: “The first task was to scuff them up a little, give them a little worn look. Bright, shiny black & whites weren't in vogue as I remember.” He said the comment he now gets most often about his shoes, and the one that “exasperates me most, is 'Just get off the golf course?' Even on January 20.” But he said he also hears people saying “Sharp!” and “I like 'em!” with no extra explanation necessary. Another saddle shoe wearing journalist in the state is Tom Alex, the Des Moines Register’s veteran police reporter. He also pre-dated me in starting to wear them. “I am wearing them in my first-day-of-kindergarten photo,” said Alex. “So I grew up with them.”  He noted that he grew away from the shoes for a number of years. “By fourth grade, we all wanted shoes with a pull-out tongue, and by sixth grade we wouldn’t be seen in anything but low-cut white tennis-type shoes,” he said. “Then came penny loafers, and on and on. I don’t think I wore saddle shoes in high school, 1963-’66. “But I started at the Ottumwa Courier in 1971 and the Clinton Herald in 1973, so I would have bought my first pair as an adult about then. I loved to buy sweaters, and it seems to me one of the sweatered mannequins at a store in either Ottumwa or Clinton was wearing saddle shoes. So I bought the shoes to go with a sweater. They were comfy and cool. Dark blue in the middle rather than black, and they looked great with jeans. When they wore out, I got a second pair. The ones you rounded up in ’94 were, I think, my third pair as an adult. I wore them until they literally fell apart. By then my kids had discovered brand-name clothes, so – you know the rest.” If Alex is indicating there that he needs another pair of saddle shoes, and for all the rest of you who do, here’s help: www.muffys.com. Many of you readers will recall that in late 2004, I wrote here about the 10-year anniversary of the great “Back in the Saddle” campaign. And as I was doing so, I had another shock from Bass Shoes. They had sold out to the huge, St. Louis-based Brown Shoe, and the bosses at Brown, who of course had never heard of me, discontinued black & white saddle shoes! I moaned about that in the column, but soon got consolation and good news from a saddle shoe wearing reader outside Atlanta. Tom Carter, who described himself as “a 40-something biologist living in Georgia,” said that he “grew up in the Midwest, and I have been wearing saddles since I can remember.” He had used the Internet to discover the mother lode of saddle shoes available at a little company Muffy’s Enterprises, LLC, based in Manning, Oregon (pop. 200). I was in touch immediately, of course, and learned that Margaret “Muffy” Marshall and her husband Allen Marshall, who are now 53 and 57, were longtime devotees of saddle shoes who were leading normal lives – until they got frustrated at being unable to buy new saddles anywhere. So they started their own company. You can read my January, 2005, story about them, and see some of their saddle shoes, by clicking here. So for this centennial observance of saddle shoes, I called the Marshalls this week and asked them if they’d had a saddle shoe parade, or a saddle shoe festival – any kind of celebration like that of the 100 years of cool shoes. “No, we’ve been too busy, I’m afraid,” said Allen. “It’s just been crazy. Right now, we’re just getting overwhelmed by dealing with mothers-in-crisis. During back-to-school time, a whole lot of them decided they wanted their kids in saddle shoes, and they all seemed to find us. We were barely able to keep up with it. A lot more schools around the country are going back to requiring uniforms on the kids, and many of them have saddle shoes as part of the uniform.” In fact, business has been so good that the Marshalls are moving it soon to a larger building in a larger town to the northwest, Vernonia (pop. 2,500). He described it being about halfway between Portland and the coastal town of Astoria. The Marshalls reported that now at centennial time, the popularity of saddle shoes is on the rise. They said they are keeping 3,000 to 4,000 pairs of saddle shoes in stock and ready for shipment. Those include the new models their company is producing now, as well as some of the shoes they bought from other companies – and some of those shoes are 30 to 40 years old. They also have their own collection of “historic saddle shoes” they won’t sell – like the pair that Muffy owns which were once owned and worn by Marilyn Monroe. “We’re shipping all over the United States and to Germany, England, Canada, Australia,” Allen Marshall said. “And, yes, we send quite a few pairs to Iowa, too.” He said Muffys shoes are being worn in several plays on Broadway in New York City – he listed “Hair Spray,” “Movin’ Out” and “Color Purple.” And every time an actor or actress walks out on stage wearing a pair of those saddle shoes, at Muffy's they know they'll be getting additional inquiries and orders by phone or e-mail. Allen said with the fall rush over, “maybe now we can start thinking of some good way to celebrate the centennial. Maybe we should set up kind of a museum in our new building. We’d also thought bout doing a ‘centennial shoe,’ maybe a red, white & blue one – but don’t commit me to that yet.” He said he’s mostly ready to kick back a little bit and enjoy the autumn. “I’ve always loved the fall,” he said, “especially when those cheerleaders come out in saddle shoes!” You can reach the author by e-mail at chuck@Offenburger.com.
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