Eugene’s oldest shoe repair store doesn’t just repair shoes
Mike Summers repairs shoes at Jims Shoe Doctor in Eugene
In an era of trashing our old shoes, Mike Summers keeps them “heeled.”
- Mike Summers, a longtime shoe repairman, now owns and operates the 122-year-old Jim’s Shoe Doctor.
- Summers almost didn’t buy the shop due to the challenges of small business ownership, but ultimately accepted an offer he “couldn’t refuse.”
- Jim’s Shoe Doctor repairs a wide variety of items, including shoes, saddles and vehicle leather. It even constructs orthopedic shoes.
Navigating the workshop of Jim’s Shoe Doctor is a hazard for the inexperienced. Strips of leather and spare soles stack up next to imposing machinery and scraps on the floor.
Mike Summers barely even looks where he’s moving. He doesn’t need to. With his eyes on the next pair, he drops a pair of newly beveled shoes into a box. The pair is his 10th of the hour and one of tens of thousands of his shoe-making career.
Summers grew up around shoe makers. When he was a child, his best friend’s father owned multiple shops around Eugene, and when he was 16, he started apprenticing at Baker’s Shoe Repair. After he was laid off from Baker’s during the large-scale downturn in business in the early 2000s, Summers bounced around shops at the end of the valley. He worked with shoes at Sheldon Shoe Repair, Atrium Shoe Repair and eventually Sole Savers before being asked to buy Jim’s Shoe Doctor.
Summers was almost not a willing buyer of the now 122-year-old Jim’s Shoe Doctor. After the fifth owner, Bill, asked him for the second time, Summers said he was made “an offer that I couldn’t refuse.”
One reason he didn’t want to buy the shop was he didn’t want to run a business again. “People don’t understand what it actually takes to own and operate a small business,” said Summers. “You have all these costs that are on top of all your expenses, your supplies, all that sort of thing, and at the end of the day, you hope to make a dollar.”
Nevertheless, Summers keeps the shop open. He stands at one of his many stations for hours every day. The factory’s industrial paint has long been stripped from where shoes make contact with the whirring machines.
Repairing for new customers
Another challenge in the business, according to Summers, is simply that potential customers don’t think their shoes can be fixed. He even once thought that himself.
One day, when visiting his parents, Summers told them he’d refused $400 worth of repairs that day for shoes that he deemed not worth his time.
His father disagreed.
“He told me, ‘The people brought them to you wanting them fixed. So, if you can fix them, why are you not fixing them? Don’t judge somebody else’s motives for wanting something done,’” Summers recalled.
“The biggest thing I would like people to know is that things can be fixed. There’s not a person out there that we can’t do something for, and yet we probably only see less than 5% out of the valley ever in our store.”
One of Summers’ greatest assets is his adaptability, he says. Jim’s Shoe Doctor doesn’t just repair shoes. The shop takes in and repairs riding saddles, vehicle leather, bags, coats and more. “Pretty much anything you need to be glued, stitched or nailed together,” says Summers. The shop has even started to construct orthopedic shoes that reduce pain for customers with unique foot shapes.
A stashed ‘retirement’ plan
Summers won’t be running the store forever. He has a collection of BMX-style bikes and their parts stacked together into one tangled object in the basement of Jim’s Shoe Doctor.
“My whole thing is kids need to be out riding their bikes. That’s all I would do all day long, every day when I wasn’t at school. I was on my bike with my friends.”
Repairing donated or cheaply bought bikes allows Summers to give kids who ordinarily wouldn’t be able to race BMX bikes a far cheaper option. “My whole thing is you don’t have to have a $4,000 bike. You don’t have to have a $2,000 bike. You don’t have to have even a $1,000 bike to be fast.
“For a parent to lay down four grand and buy it and all the accessories and stuff, it’s kind of crazy.”
Summers isn’t planning to shut down the shoe repair business; he hopes to pass down the responsibilities to his son-in-law.
Shoes in various states have been walking in and out of Jim’s Shoe Doctor for more than 100 years, and Summers hopes the business will continue “heeling” Eugene’s “soles” for many more years.
This is the second in a three-part series from intern Miles Cull on people in Lane County who fix things most people don’t know how to repair.
link
