Impressions from My Month Working In Gary Indiana in 1973

I grew up in Osceola Indiana. During my junior and senior high school years I worked at Kinney shoes in the Concord mall in Elkhart. When I graduated I felt kind of lost. I turned down a chance to go to Ball State university and after join the Air Force who would have paid for my education and instead basically spent the summer of 1973 drunk and chasing girls. During this hiatus from reality I supported myself (barely) by working for minimum wage at the shoe store.

In the fall of that year my manager approached me and told me there was an opening to work full time at a store in Gary Indiana. Being the sharp businessman that I was I jumped at the chance. The job still paid minimum wage or close to it and would barely make the payment on my recently acquired Pinto station wagon, but hey, sharp businessman here. The fact that I ate my first pizza in Gary using my shoehorn as a pizza cutter illustrates my poverty level.

So I set out for Gary. I rented a dilapidated 1950ish travel trailer to live in and headed in for my first day of work in downtown Gary. I met my manager, pretty much the only other white guy in the area. When he opened the store, what a site to behold. A turn table started to spin up which had several layers, kind of like a wedding cake. On each layer were several sample shoes. These were the 70’s style platform shoes with mostly 3 to 4 inch soles. Two giant surveillance cameras started to track back and forth, one on each side of the showroom. My manager later confided that they were fake.

As my first day continued I remember looking out of the shoe store window and seeing this wall of thick brown air rolling down the street like some kind of Biblical plague as the steel mills started up for the day. This brown dust settled on everything and made it a constant headache to keep the displays and display shoes clean. Sometimes we had to throw brand new shoes away because they became unclean-able.

The assistant manager was a nice middle aged black lady. I noticed that she always walked to her car after work with a coat hanging over her arm. I asked her one day why she did that and she showed me that she was carrying a loaded gun hidden under the coat incase she was attacked on the way to the parking garage.

Soon after I started my manager told me that some people would come in who believe that white people are the devil and will not allow themselves to be touched by us. Several did come into the store while I was there. If I serviced them I could bring shoes but they would put them on and take them off themselves or ask that the assistant manager do it. They also would not let me lay change in their hands. They would lay the money for the shoes on the counter and I would lay the return change on the counter. It was interesting and a little scary to be in a situation where I was the minority!

Some of the customers wore some classic garish 70’s outfits. Purple leisure suites with flared legs and long tailed coats. Always those platform shoes in all kinds of colors. Everyone who wore those looked like a giant strutting around.

Those are my main impressions from my Gary experience almost 50 years ago. Within a month I realized I couldn’t make it financially and was starting to worry. I was also very homesick and drove the 60 or 70 miles back to Osceola almost every weekend. During one of those weekend visits I was in a serious automobile accident that totalled my Pinto wagon. The wreck must have knocked some sense into me because I quit that shoe store job right after and found a local one that paid the bills.

It was an interesting experience and one that I have cherished ever since and also would not want to repeat.