In the beginning, long before Mast Shoes consolidated its downtown locations and relocated to its present storefront in Westgate shopping center, there was a different shoe store there. The Nobil Family Shoe Center was the first leaseholder in that spot in the strip mall, and working there was my first real job.

It was the fall of 1971 and I was starting my senior year at Pioneer High. Needing some spending money to support my budding career as a magician, I responded to a classified ad in the Ann Arbor News for a part-time job at Nobil’s Shoes. The opportunity seemed full of promise for an eager young man like me.

I ended up working there through my college years at the U-M and a bit beyond. Wearing bell-bottom polyester pants and sporting an extensive collection of brightly printed neckties made by my future
mother-in-law, my journey in “shoe business” would take me from an adolescent clerk to a savvy proprietor. Selling shoes taught me a lot about retail and customer service that proved to be a solid background for operating my own local magic shops in the years that followed. My gig at Nobil’s even taught me a little trickery that couldn’t be found in any of my magic books.

—

Nobil Shoes was one of the original tenants of Westgate, a typical 1960s shopping center that went up shortly after the construction of I-94 reached the confluence of Jackson, Maple, and Stadium. Oddly enough, all three roads are represented in the various Westgate store addresses. A Bill Knapp’s Restaurant and a Kroger grocery store served as the initial anchors for this busy corner, spawning rapid commercial growth that soon included an S.S. Kresge dime store, Arlan’s Department Store, and a host of smaller regional retailers like Nobil’s. Opened in 1963 when I was just a third grader at nearby Haisley Elementary, it quickly became my family’s neighborhood outlet for dress shoes, gym sneakers, and winter boots.

Like so many other resellers back then, Nobil Shoes was part of a vast distribution network for the Endicott-Johnson Corporation based in upstate New York. The stores were named after their founder, Jacob Nobil, a Russian immigrant who established the firm in the early 1900s in northeast Ohio. Jacob’s son George, a U-M grad, became president of the company in 1966. From their headquarters in Akron, the Nobils opened branches all around their home state and throughout the Midwest.

Nobil’s strove to offer the full variety of fashionable women’s pumps and sandals along with classic men’s oxfords and wingtips. The children’s department had a more limited offering—mostly the stiff Dick & Jane dress shoes and cloth “gym shoes” that seemed sufficient for Baby Boomer kids in those days. I remember selling everything from those iconic orthopedic white baby boots to the sloppy clip-fastened rubber galoshes favored by older men. Vinyl go-go boots were all the rage after Nancy Sinatra’s hit “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” came out, but they didn’t fit many women. More than once I was put in an awkward position, either physically, as I was expected to help yank up the boots, or psychologically, as a customer’s strenuous attempt to pull them on resulted in a ripped seam.

Most of the time, though, our customers treated shoe shopping as drudgery, never happening at a convenient time—it was usually done at the last minute and under some kind of duress. Our attempt to provide a positive sales experience was often met with groans and even (no kidding!) vomiting. Countless times I was barely able to leap back from tying some kid’s laces before they heaved out a shower of spew, either from nervousness or being dragged to the store from a sick bed.

—

During the slow times, especially on Sundays, I became adept at fun and mischief. The toy balloons that were meant as giveaways for the kids often became a slow-moving ball in our backroom volleyball and basketball games. I also spent one summer building a loft above some of the sturdier shelving units of the stockroom with another part-timer. Outfitting it with a low-slung coffee table and couch and stocking it with snacks, we plugged in a radio to listen to Detroit Tigers ball games. It was our own special retreat—until the regional manager discovered it on one of his visits. Like a disappointed parent, he ordered our little mezzanine be dismantled immediately, telling us whatever hopes he had for us to be professional shoe salesmen had been dashed.

I never planned to make a career of it, but I did mature over my years at Nobil Shoes. I mastered the inventory stock system and learned how to wait on several customers at a time, as well as how to check people out when our cashier was away from the register. Eventually I was even authorized to custom-dye the cloth wedding pumps and clutch purses that were in vogue back in the 1970s—a surprisingly high-class service from such a pedestrian retailer. After a few years, I was given the responsibility of opening the store in the morning. I was entrusted with a door key and taught the opening procedures for the cash register.

This was back when cash was king and only 16 percent of U.S. households had a credit card. While big-city department store chains and even many of Ann Arbor’s bigger retailers like Goodyear’s and Jacobson’s offered house credit accounts, general-use credit cards were just starting to surface. Nobil’s accepted locally drawn personal checks, but cold hard cash was still the preferred way to transact business. Even our weekly pay was doled out in cash right from the register. Relying on cash, of course, came with risks.

Having a fully stocked drawer in the cash register was vital for transacting business from the moment we unlocked the door, meaning we had to keep a sizable change fund on the premises overnight. I still remember the day my manager John called me over to teach me the secret of hiding cash.

—

“We always take the currency out of the cash register at night,” John explained, “and leave the drawer pulled out and open.” The register was near the front window and in plain sight of anyone looking in. “This deters would-be thieves because they can see that there is no cash in the register. If we kept it closed, even with no money in it, we would have a costly repair should they break in and try to pry it open.”

Naturally I wanted to know where we actually did keep the money. Couldn’t someone just look in all the obvious places and find the hidden cash bag? Did we have a safe, or did we always keep it in the same place? “Ah,” John replied with a twinkle in his eye. “This is where we apply a little shoe salesman shrewdness.” I was about to learn the secret of the random shoe.

“When you let yourself in any morning, look for a single shoe lying in the middle of the sales floor. To the untrained eye, it simply looks like an errant shoe that fell off of a display or that was left over from someone trying on shoes the day before. Only those of us who are ‘in’ on the ruse know that it is actually the key to finding the cash bag. And even if someone else did suspect it was a clue, they would need to know our inventory stock system to find it.”

The subterfuge was ingeniously simple. When the night managers were closing up, they would select an arbitrary box from the stock shelves and replace one of the shoes inside with the cash bag. Tucking the box back in place, they would then toss the displaced shoe in an obvious open space on the sales floor. All the morning opener had to do was recognize the random shoe, read the stock code and size imprinted in it, and, knowing how our stock system worked, locate the correct box.

Every day a different shoe. Every night a different box among hundreds shelved all around the store. Every morning an easy clue for a trusted shoe store employee. It was like a good mystery story where the clues are hidden in plain sight and only the savvy detective can perceive what others cannot. It goes without saying that a young magician like me appreciated the clever idea and its application in fooling an audience.

—

My wife Kay and I were married in 1974 while I was still employed at Nobil’s. I remember that after we left the ceremony at Trinity Lutheran Church up the road on Stadium, we felt we had to honor some fuzzy tradition of honking our car horn around town on the way to the reception. Without a real plan in place of where to do this, we ended up cruising past the Westgate store in an obnoxious show of revelry that probably impressed no one.

Nobil Shoes suffered from many of the fragilities of out-of-state corporate ownership. In my tenure, I outlasted five managers, thirteen assistant managers, and twenty-two other part-time employees. That high turnover led to a lack of employee investment in the success of the store, not to mention the hijinks and tomfoolery, most of which I eventually learned to stay above. By the end, I had been there longer than anyone else and might just as well have been running the place.

During my later years there, when the weather was warm enough, I’d prop the back delivery door open and look beyond the back parking lot to the pine trees just beyond the slightly elevated I-94 highway. As the sun set behind the trees and the clouds turned fiery orange, I’d listen to the drone of the cars and trucks whizzing by and dream of the future. Those were always “Go West, young man” kind of moments when I knew my life’s calling was beyond this simple horizon, just waiting for me. I’m sure it was during one of those back-door daydreams that I first felt it was time to quit selling shoes.

I put what I had learned to use managing the shoe department at Goodyear’s Department Store on Main St. for a few years, then went full-time into my career as a professional magician. Nobil Shoes was gone from Westgate by 1981, and the chain would eventually succumb to changing times, one among many shoe retailers that have come and gone. Yet despite its shortcomings and 1970s kitsch, I still cherish my years at Nobil Shoes, Westgate’s original shoe store. After all, it had taught me the ingenious trick of hiding all that cash.