SO L.A. : Rubber and Canvas Soul : Marc Bonner’s Mission to Save the Vanishing American Sneaker
It has not been a banner day for the chronicler of the American sneaker. His own Size 11 1/2 blue low-cut Royal Pro-Keds stagger on the asphalt of the Rose Bowl parking lot.
“My neck’s on fire,” he murmurs. “My eyes are burning. It’s very hard to concentrate on anything except my pain.”
Usually, Marcel Addison Bonner strides the cramped aisles of this swap meet with springy authority. The bulky 23-year-old with the harsh, cropped hair and the wild, untamed sideburns of a Civil War soldier will pause only at the sight of a gorgeous vintage tennis or basketball shoe. Although he might not be able to afford even one pair, Marc will scrutinize every discovery. If it surpasses his every expectation, he will fish out his 35-millimeter Minolta from his knapsack, capturing the curvature of the toe guard, the texture of the canvas, the convexity of the rubber suction cups on the soles.
This morning, he has been able to find only a few specimens worthy of committing to posterity, and he has had to fight for them. A surly adolescent barely stood still as Marc photographed his feet. An exhibitor frowned at him for fondling a pair of Red Ball utility shoes that he had no intention of buying. True, a Japanese tourist took off his vintage shoes for Marc to snap pictures of the inner soles. Marc recognized in the tourist’s smile a passion for sneakers nearly as strong as his own. But that was his only consolation.
Even his number-30 sun block has failed to protect his skin, managing only to drip into his eyes and temporarily blind him. Dying for a soda, wanting just to get the hell out of here, Marc gropes for the exit when he spots a pair of white Pro-Keds tennis shoes. He recognizes their significance immediately. They taper off gracefully into a point, like a Tretorn, but they sport a fat red-and-blue racing stripe across the flank and the blue company name tag at the heel. A hint of azure terry cloth peeks out from the seams.
“Damn it,” Marc curses to no one in particular, or perhaps to the sneakers. “For Chrissakes.” He scoops up the Pro-Keds, inspects the zigzag soles and then smooth talks the salesman.
“You mind if I get a brief shot of this?” he asks with a half-smile, half-grimace. Falling upon one knee, Marc positions the sneakers for their photo op. They may have been manufactured more than 20 years ago, but never have they been handled with such love, never have they been so thoroughly adored as they are at this moment. Marc squints through the camera and brings these discontinued beauties into as good a focus as his bloodshot eyes will allow.
“All right, that’s it,” he says, turning away from the sneakers, rising to six feet. “I wanna get out of here, but I would have had this regret about not taking pictures of them.”
An hour later, in the air-conditioned darkness of Palermo’s restaurant in Los Feliz, gulping down free refills of Sprite, Marc has regained his composure. Formula one race cars are dancing upon the TV screen above his head. A baby at anearby Naugahyde booth is sobbing. But Marc shuts out all the distractions as he begins his talk on sneaker minutiae.
No, no, he admonishes the reporter, the last pair of sneakers he saw at the swap meet were gorgeous, but they did not have that rare balloon-style calligraphy on the blue Pro-Keds name tag. “The balloon ones are a specific style,” he explains. “They are really wacky looking letters. There is an an example in here, or should be.”
He starts thumbing through his “shoe book,” an ever expanding work of cultural anthropology that charts the rise and fall of the canvas sneaker through 70 years of American life. Three years after its inception, the book is already bursting beyond the confines of its four-inch loose-leaf binder. Marc began the study in earnest when he realized that his salary as a bookstore clerk would never allow him to rescue every old sneaker he encountered. With his camera, he could at least capture their likenesses before their probable departure for Japan or their callous wearing-out by some Melrose Avenue hipster.
Entire chapters of the scrapbook are dedicated to the mighty American tire companies that churned out canvas-and-rubber sneakers from 1917 until the dawn of the Ronald Reagan era. U.S. Rubber, Uniroyal, the Hood Rubber Co., Goodyear and B.F. Goodrich are all represented, as are tire-independent firms such as Red Ball Band and Converse. Sneaker advertisements culled from early Sports Illustrated and Boy Scout magazines have been placed alongside photos of survivors unearthed at swap meets and thrift stores.
Turning to the chapter on Pro-Keds, Marc finds a photograph of a mid-’70s lime-green model called the “Dude.” “See,” he says, triumphantly tracing the “P” of the Pro-Keds name with a blunt index finger. “That’s the fun lettering. See the way they’re kind of rounded at the tips?” He flips back a few pages to another name tag that seems indistinguishable, but only to an unschooled eye. “Those letters are fatter,” he says with academic seriousness. “But they’re not like fun, balloony, circusy.”
“What’s all this stuff?” interjects our waiter.
“It’s just a kind of documentation of vintage sneakers.” Marc’s voice is suddenly hesitant, wary.
The waiter, a Gen-Xer with a raven pompadour, lets loose a casual snicker. “Oh really. What are you doing that for?”
“Just for--just for the fun of it,” Marc answers glumly.
“Really?”
Then, mustering some courage, Marc defends himself. “Yeah. The stuff’s disappearing very rapidly. The Japanese are taking them out of the country. And then the record will be lost.”
“That’s a good idea,” the waiter warms up. “What started it? Are you a design type of guy?”
“No,” Marc shakes his head. “I’m not a designer or anything. I’m just interested in vintage sneakers.”
“Heh, heh, heh, heh,” the waiter chuckles, each syllable notching a note up the melodic scale. “That’s great. That’s great, man.” He strains to look at an open page of the book. “That’s pretty cool stuff.”
One minute more, and the waiter has practically turned into Marc’s agent, encouraging him to rent out his scrapbook to the movie studios or to look into publishing a coffee-table book.Then it’s time to play “stump the expert.”
“So,” the waiter asks, “do you know what kind of basketball shoes they were wearing in that movie ‘Blubber’ ”?
“You mean ‘Flubber?’ ” Marc corrects.
“Yeah, ‘Flubber.’ ”
They are actually talking about “The Absent Minded Professor,” a 1961 Disney movie, in which Fred McMurray discovers a substance--”flubber,” or flying rubber--that makes winners of an underdog basketball team.
“Yeah,” Marc brightens. “U.S. Keds. Most of the kids in the ‘50s wore U.S. Keds. And the older kids wore Converse.”
“Now,” the waiter presses on, “where does that come from, ‘Keds’? “
“Well, it came from ‘Peds,’ actually--P-E-D--for ‘foot.’ ” Marc has now reverted to the high tone of the lecture circuit. “The company that was using it found out that another company held the copyright, so they just changed the ‘K’ for the ‘P.’ Like ‘kids.’ ‘Keds.’ ”
“That’s interesting,” the waiter enthuses before fetching another refill of Sprite. “Cool! Great!”
Although he never strives for anything more than a documentary shot, some of Marc’s photos rise to the level of art. There is a strange solemnity to one pair of sneakers from the 1950s. The hole through which a boy once slipped his foot is now a gaping absence. Staring too long at this photograph can turn you into an unwilling disciple of the men’s movement or a choked-up watcher of the “Wonder Years.” You speculate as to what became of that child, whether he burned his draft card or proudly pulled on combat boots, whether he donned a leisure suit and boogied down in Wallabees. Is he sinking comfortably now into a pair of middle-aged Rockports? Does he ever get a dim, pleasant memory of the still-jaunty Size 5 Sears Jeepers that have wound up in Marc’s scrapbook.
The canvas-and-rubber sneaker would attain what Marc considers its apogee during the Dwight Eisenhower Administration, when the sole would abandon its resemblance to tire tread and begin taking subliminal design cues from contemporary architecture. The U.S. Keds sole of that era, he observes, “looks so much like mosaics in ‘50s coffee shops, a real ‘50s atomic look.” A PF Flyer, with its arching constellations of perforated diamonds, looks very Frank Lloyd Wright, “very Hollyhock House.”
For the next 30 years, the cost-cutters would have their way. The strip of slick vinyl surrounding the lace-holes would be abandoned for bare canvas. The rubber ankle guard, meant toprotect against side impact, would be swapped for a purely ornamental disc of pressed-on cloth. The thick, undulating ridges that graced the toe would be replaced by a meek band of pebbled rubber. “The loss of ridges,” Marc laments. “It’s just a money-saving thing. It’s a product getting cheaper because the company is not willing to spend enough money tobuild a better product.”
Then the planned obsolescence and the technological breakthroughs of the performance era would take over during the 1980s. Reebok and Nike would pound the classic Americansneaker into near-oblivion, leaving only the Converse All-Star and the Jack Purcell to reign over a decimated field.
The waiter returns, still smiling. He doesn’t realize how privileged he has been. Only 10 other people have set eyes upon the shoe book.
“I don’t want people to laugh at the book or something,” Marc says after the waiter leaves. “So I’m kind of selective about who I show it to.”
*
Marc’s cramped bedroom in the Van Nuys apartment he shares with his mother is like an archeological dig of his obsessions. Sneakers, most too deteriorated or too recent to be worth anything, are scattered about the blue carpet; his core collection, numbering 60, is locked in a storage room downstairs. Ancient issues of Boys’ Life litter the floor, while comic books from the “Bewitched” television series have been placed more thoughtfully upon a milk crate. And, of course, there is the Brady Bunch--that last perfect family of the San Fernando Valley--gazing at Marc from posters, books and album covers. Maureen McCormick, a.k.a. Marcia Brady, flashes a smile from a favorite T-shirt draped upon a chair.
Nothing in this room, unless it is a reproduction or a major household appliance, seems to have been manufactured within the last 15 years. “There’s not much about the future or the present that really interests or intrigues me,” Marc admits. The one exception is music; he is as committed to new bands like the Muffs, the Makers and Steel Pole Bathtub as he is to the cocktail lounge strains of Les Baxter. But he’s always preferred reruns to current TV shows, revival houses to first-run theaters. His car is a powder-blue LTD Crown Victoria, a ballsy four-door sedan once favored by the LAPD. The typewriter he uses to churn out captions for his shoe book is his great-grandfather’s Smith-Corona. Although his bank issued him an ATM card, he has never gotten around to figuring it out.
“You know,” Marc confides, “change is just an incredibly difficult thing for me. I guess I avoid it whenever possible. I have a very hard time with things I’m not familiar with. It’s important for my well-being to be familiar with my situation.”
Marc’s transition from youth to adulthood has been so seamless that sometimes one wonders whether his youth is truly over. He started working part-time as a clerk at Dutton’s Bookstore after his 15th birthday. His three semesters at Valley College were a disaster--”It was making me insane,” he says. “I never liked school”-- and so he dropped out to work at Dutton’s full time. He now checks in the new stock and ships back the unsold books.
In his spare time, with an adult seriousness, Marc ferrets out all the trappings of a childhood circa 1971--the year of his birth. He wears corduroys and Levis with an eight-inch flare and glues together hot rod models designed a quarter-century ago. He spends entire Sundays restoring a Blue Schwinn Stingray with his best friend, Adam Maron, whom he has known since they were both 7-year-olds at the Valley City Jewish Community Center.
Adam usually serves as Marc’s loyal lieutenant at the swap meets, keeping an extra pair of eyes peeled for rare sneakers, propping them up in the desired positions for a photo session. In turn, Marc helps out with Adam’s artwork, scanning the streets of the Valley for flattened birds, possums or squirrels. Adam will screech his Acura to the curb, fetch a shovel from the trunk and dump the road kill into a box. Later, he casts the corpse in solid bronze.
*
A languorous morning at Remix, a dead-stock bootery on Beverly Boulevard that caters to the Japanese passion for vintage American sneakers and shoes. Emerging from the stockroom with a pair of Buddy’s high tops, the saleswoman, Jessica Dickerson, is a vintage vision. With her tightly drawn pigtails and precise bangs, her rayon shirt of dying autumn leaves, her cherry red lipstick made all the more dazzling by her pallor, Jessica seems ready to celebrate V-J Day all over again.
“Those are very ‘40s tire-looking,” Marc marvels, taking in the full splendor of the Buddy’s. “An incredible amount of rubber. Didn’t you have one of these on display?”
“We had that one on display for a long time,” Jessica confirms in a husky voice, “and these Japanese guys kept wanting to buy it. And I said no.”
“Cool,” Marc says.
“And finally I got sick of saying no, so I just hid it.”
“I have to remember to photograph those.”
“You didn’t bring your camera?” Jessica’s jaw drops. “Oh failure!”
“I just have the worst short-term memory,” Marc apologizes, shoulders slumping in his “Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill” T-shirt.
Marc is a dervish at Remix. He flexes and probes every sneaker on the rack, then charges up the aluminum ladder in the stockroom to examine the artwork on the boxes. Today he discovers a pair of Pro-Keds Court Kings so rare, and in such exquisite shape, that he yanks the box off the shelves and calls out to Jessica.
He was not always so comfortable here. “The first time he just came in he showed me what he had, talked about shoes, and then he kind of timidly broached the subject of taking pictures,” Jessica recalls. “I said, ‘Yeah, go for it.’ ” She was glad that the one person who had chosen to do this was a local kid, “not some snobby collector that was going to write a price guide and buy a house. I hate that mentality. He’s just doing it because he loves it.”
Marc’s passion for sneakers once nudged him across the continent. A year ago, he was strolling Hollywood Boulevard with Adam, looking for punk-rock records. “This Rasta guy and his girlfriend were coming in the opposite direction,” he recalls, “and I looked down and saw these bright-red, brand-new-yet-old-stock Pro-Keds high tops.”
The Rastafarian told Marc that the slums of New York were a treasure trove for long-obsolete sneakers. A month later, Marc and Adam walked into a Harlem sneaker emporium. The proprietress eyed them with suspicion, then grudgingly exhumed two dozen pairs of mid-’70s era Pro-Keds gathering dust in the back room. Marc bought about 20, and she was won over. “She said, ‘Come back to Harlem.’ ” Marc repeats her farewell in a singsong voice, “ ‘Come back and see us.’ ”
Inevitably, the sneakers have also found him. When two reporters from the Japanese magazine Lightning visited Remix for a special issue on early American basketball and tennis shoes, the owner told them of a Southern Californian who had made it his obsession to document them. The article, which appeared late last year, canonized Marc as “Dr. Sneakers.” In a full-page spread, he beams at the reader in his Marcia Brady T-shirt, surrounded by a constellation of sneakers.
Intrigued by the article, an advertising executive for the Pro-Keds Japan account flew from Tokyo to examine Marc’s shoe book and collection. This executive was soon followed by the president of the company, an assistant and a translator. At Woo Lea Oak, a Korean barbecue palace in Beverly Hills, the three businessmen cut Marc’s marinated beef and placed it upon the tabletop flames. All the while, they gently grilled him about all things vintage.
“I really got the impression that the Japanese are just very interested in classic America--antiques, furniture and cars,” Marc remembers. “They seemed totally fascinated with this whole swap-meet thing. They were like, ‘old Americana everywhere?’ It’s like Disneyland to them, probably.”
At the end of the meal, Hiroyoshi Kuramae, the president of Pro Keds Japan, made Marc an offer. In 1991, Stride Rite, the present owner of the Keds name, had ventured a failed resurrection of the Pro-Ked in America. Marc had only contempt for the cheap rubber and inferior ankle-guards used on these impostors. More recently, the company manufactured another version that did away with the blue Pro-Keds tag at the heel, which he considered an act of blasphemy. But the Japanese had been far more successful. Pro-Keds Japan had re-created most of the classic catalogue with the workmanship and materials found in the originals--though only for their domestic market.
So when Kuramae pulled a note pad and pen from his jacket pocket and said he would ship any and all models free of charge, just tell him the size, Marc was elated. “Eleven and a half,” he blurted out, and then the businessman’s face fell.
“He kind of looked at his assistant, like ‘oh oh,’ ” Marc remembers. “His eyes were peering back and forth, like he had made a blunder.” Catering to a nation of small feet, Pro-Keds Japan made sizes only up to 10.
*
The Crown Victoria has reached a familiar destination. Brows knit with longing, Marc beholds for a few moments this most telegenic house in America as it dissolves into the gloom of dusk. It’s been a dream of his, even before he found the famous sitcom exterior in Studio City, to build a replica of the Brady Bunch home or purchase the real thing.
He sees nothing eerie about taking over Mike and Carol Brady’s place. “I would be totally comfortable with it,” Marc says. “I think it’s a great design. I love the living room. I like the stone wall by the stairway. I like the kitchen colors--orange and green. New kitchens don’t do anything for me. Yeah, I’d be very happy living in this house.”
Having seen every episode of “The Brady Bunch” dozens of times, Marc still studies each segment with a love untainted by any irony. “I’m looking at the background and the sets,” he reports, “the clothing, things sitting on the dresser.” With his specialized knowledge, he can tell you the evolution of Bobby Brady’s sneaker proclivities through the show’s five seasons.
There is a hunger in Marc’s conversation for the stability of this television family--the doting housewife and mother, the understanding breadwinner father and the brood that bows to their stable and authoritative love. That sense of stability also permeates the piles of ancient sneaker ads he has collected, sketching as they do a world of patient Little League coaches, kindly Scout masters and obedient children.
Marc prefers this comforting portrait of the past to his assessment of today’s youth. “Kids today,” he sighs with weariness. “They’re just all wanna-be gangsters. That’s pop culture. You’ve got to look hard when you’re a little kid. I didn’t have worries like that as when I was 8 years old. But you can’t be a kid now.”
Marc recently read an article on the decline of Van Nuys’ Grant High School, where he was class of ’89. “The article said it was the most troubled school in almost every way,” Marc says, “so it’s kind of like I was one of the last ones to get through the dying system.”
Yet Marc’s own childhood was by no means traditional or placid. His parents first met as members of an Eastern European folk ensemble called Aman. For the wedding, his father, Robert James Bonner, stitched both his brown peasant cape and his bride’s rough white dress. During the early days together, the couple would sing madrigals for their supper at Santa Monica restaurants.
In the family album, his father’s golden hair, caught in a flowery crimson headband, cascades past a droopy Allman Brothers mustache. At this point in his career, Robert Bonner had dropped his dream of apprenticing himself to a craftsman of medieval recorders and had begun his job screening outpatients at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. Amy Bonner, though an accredited teacher, was employed variously as an office worker, magazine editor and bookkeeper. The family bounced from Venice to Santa Monica to Van Nuys to Canoga Park. And that was only before the divorce, when Marc was 4. From there, the suburb flitting continued--from Silver Lake to Sherman Oaks to North Hollywood, then back to Sherman Oaks and on to Van Nuys.
“I think I was going through quite a bit of turmoil in a single-parent kind of way,” Marc concedes. “I was never the popular kid in school. I was picked on. Like junior high school and high school were hell for me. Let me tell you, having the name Bonner, it so easily becomes ‘Boner.’ All it would take was one substitute teacher to mispronounce it, and the rest of the school year, that was the official name.”
So Marc reached backward, toward his infancy, seizing upon the early ‘70s as a less turbulent time. “A better time,” he assesses, “in terms of the general vibe of people. Maybe people were less cynical then, and kids were kind of seen as kids.”
He scarcely flinches when you remind him that he is talking about the era of the Vietnam War and Watergate, a time of extreme turmoil and cynicism. “When I think of ’69 to ‘74,” Marc rejoins, “I think of ‘The Brady Bunch,’ not the Vietnam War. ‘The Brady Bunch’ never mentions the Vietnam War.”
A few weeks before, Marc had watched “The Brady Bunch Home Movies,” one of the interminable specials that have exploited the show’s popularity. The show featured faded footage of the Brady kids visiting tourist destinations like the Manhattan theater district and William Shakespeare’s home as well as updates on the children today. Maureen McCormick, once Marcia Brady, is now a country-Western singer with a single on the charts. Christopher Knight, who played Peter, is developing educational CD-ROMs based on the sitcom.
Marc loved the show. It didn’t seem to bother him that even little Cindy has topped 30, and that the older kids are slipping into middle age. “It would be a little bit sad,” Marc says, “if they became like other child actors from that era who turned out so bad, robbing or doing drugs when it was all over. I had a really good feeling about it, that they were all totally readjusted.”
So, there is comfort in the way of all flesh, even televised flesh. Lately, Marc seems to be getting that same strange solace from the decay of his modest sneaker collection. Though he sprays them with protectant and seals them in airtight plastic bags, the rubber of the toes have begun to crack and split, and the soles are warping like burnished potato chips. The canvas sneaker was simply not meant to survive 1,000 years--or even 100.
So although Marc once burned with jealousy for the Japanese collectors who could buy dead-stock sneakers by the carload, he now knows that all the money in the world would not have saved them. “Whether I have them or they have them, these shoes are not going to last forever,” he says. “But as long as I can photograph them, no harm done.”
He is even thinking that sometime in the future, he might as well start wearing and enjoying the fading beauties from his own collection. Perhaps the next generation of Bonners might become the ultimate beneficiary of his passion.
“If I had a little boy,” Marc says, “I’ll probably let him wear all the little shoes I have, because they’re just going to crumble. Somebody might as well use them.” But then he must add this caveat, “As long as they’re documented.”
