“We had a big [hockey] stick rack here, and they took that away,” said Dale Camfield, pointing to an empty spot in the front of College Shoe Repair. “We started crying, because my dad bought it–and I remember how proud he was to get the hockey stuff going here.”
Dale’s the fourth generation of the Brown family to work in the shoe repair business. Her grandfather and great-grandfather started the shop in the 1930s, and her dad, Bill, came to work there full time at age sixteen. Bill met his wife, Dorothy, nearby at Drake’s Sandwich Shop. They married in 1951, and Dale and her six siblings all spent time behind the counter growing up.
As shoes got cheaper and repair work dwindled, they started selling hockey gear to fill the gap. But now more stores are getting into hockey, Dorothy recalled on December 31, and they weren’t “really making a good living anymore.” So New Year’s Eve was College Shoe Repair’s last day. Dale was behind the counter and her brother Pat was in the back fixing the last remaining shoes. Pat saw the closing as the latest in a long line of losses of small family businesses, like Schlenker Hardware and Ehnis & Son. It’s “just all corporate crap up here now,” he lamented. He worried that neighbor Dave Jones at White Market could be next–“that CVS [under construction on State] is gonna kill him.”
Bill Brown died last July, at age eighty-two. In December, Dale was planning to take some time, then start looking for a new job. “I’m going to work at Advantage Sports, that new sports shop on Stadium,” said Pat, finishing up a pair of shoes. “I got kinda lucky.”
