SweeT TeA chronicleS
The Shoe
An ode to nettleton shoes and the golden age of haberdashery
BY JIM DODSON
not long ago, my
friend Ron Crow dropped into the PineStraw world headquarters with something in a bag.
“I have something special to show you,” he said. “You may have never seen anything quite like them.” With this, he opened the bag and withdrew a pair of two-toned, black and white Nettleton tassel loafers. They were in mint condition, containing their original shoe trees, no less. In a word, I was speechless. Growing up in Greensboro, where Nettleton tassel loafers enjoyed iconic status among men of style and ambition, it was impossible not to know of — and dream of someday owning — a pair of real Nettleton loafers. My first pair came when I was 15. But more on that in a Broad Street minute. As I admitted to Ron, who now calls the Sandhills home, I knew Nettletons came in an array of famous colors — black, brown, British tan and Cordovan. But I had no clue they came in two-toned black and white as well. He smiled. “They even came in alligator.” “Did you have those, too?” “Nope. I had black and the British tan and these. These were very special, maybe a one-time deal, I don’t quite recall. I bought them around 1966 or so. Funny story about them, though. Tells you about the appeal of Nettletons.” Crow was a rising young executive for J.P. Stevens in those days. Not long after he bought his two-tone Nettletons he wore them at a business convention at the posh Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, Florida. “I was walking beside the pool when a well-dressed fellow said to me, ‘I know this may sound strange but I want to buy your shoes.’ I thought he was kidding but he was dead serious. ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘I’ll give you five hundred dollars for those shoes right now.’ I laughed and told him I’d have to think about it. Ironically, the next day, I saw the guy again and he made the same offer.” “He really wanted those shoes,” I said, marveling at his resolve. I’m not sure I’d have been so resolute. Five hundred dollars was five hundred dollars in 1966. “He did. But these were my Nettletons and I couldn’t let them go.” He held them up for me to examine, almost forty years after that encounter. “Beautiful, aren’t they?” he mused. “Such workmanship. And almost like the day I bought them.” Ron’s Nettleton reverie took me back to the early summer of 1968 when I was cutting grass along Dogwood Drive and about to start the 10th grade. All my neighborhood pals owned Nettleton tassel loafers, and I decided I
needed my own pair. The ones I wanted at Younts-DeBoe Clothiers on North Elm Street in Greensboro cost $33.50, a small fortune to me. But it was money I was ready to invest. One Saturday afternoon in June, I rode my bike all the way downtown and went to see Planet of the Apes at the Center Theater. Afterwards, I went up to Younts-DeBoe to see if the store had my size in British tan Nettletons. Stepping into Younts-DeBoe was like entering another world, a world of well-dressed men of distinction. Fine handmade shirts and neckties were displayed under glass and stocked in elegantly crafted wooden drawers. Suits and sports jackets hung in alcoves of finely crafted wood. Sporting attire, custom fitting and tuxedos were on the second floor, as I recall, and fine footwear shoes had a separate alcove of their own. An elegant fellow in a tailored suit measured my foot and accepted my hard-earned $33.50 lawn mowing funds, writing down my customfitted order for one pair of size 10 �medium-width Nettleton tassel loafers in British tan. “How long will they take to get here?” I asked, vaguely disappointed not to be able to wear them that very day. “No more than a few weeks,” he replied. “Are you in a rush for an event?” “Not really,” I was forced to admit, thinking Planet of the Apes probably didn’t count. “Just high school at the end of summer.” In those days, Greensboro was a city full of fine men’s clothing shops. “It was a golden age of men’s and women’s fine clothing,” insists Gordon Turner, who arrived from Chapel Hill to work for The Hub on Jefferson Square not long before Ron Crow found his sweet Nettleton two-tones. “This was the crossroads of the South, teeming with lawyers and doctors and businessmen, and there were great clothing shops on just about every corner of downtown.” Turner, 68, who runs Gordon’s Menswear Ltd., remains one of the Gate City’s last independently owned and operated full-service men’s clothiers along with The Hub and Lindsay Odum, both on Battleground Avenue. He’s something of a menswear historian and ticks off a list of Greensboro’s venerable men’s shops. “Several were real institutions, almost legendary. Johnson and Albert, Hall-Putnam, Vanstory’s, and of course Younts-DeBoe. You also had Gene Lashley and Wright’s Menswear and The Hub. There was also the National Shirt and Hat Shop and eventually out in Friendly Center you had Bernard Shepherd, Joel Fleishman’s and Guy Hill. The department stores along Elm Street were booming, too — Meyers, Ellis-Stone, and Thalheimers. They all had great men’s departments. Greensboro was where everyone for fifty miles or more came to buy their clothes.”
PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . June 2012
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