Good as new

Published in The Post-Star (D1)
4/29/07

Editor's Note: This is one in an occasional series on skills or traditions that are fading away.

When a shoe gets tired, most Americans would rather give it the boot than a little TLC.

"It's a disposable world out there," said Patrick Merrill, who has run Merrill's Shoe and Leather Repair on Main Street for the last 24 years. His grandfather, Alfred Nicolai, ran a shoe repair
business on Main Street in Hudson Falls for 60 years before that.

At 45, Merrill's not planning to retire anytime soon, but he recognizes that he's an anachronism in modern American culture.

"Even in the years that I've been here, things have changed," he said. "I don't think getting shoes repaired is something most people are brought up with anymore."

The Shoe Service Institute of America estimates that the number of shoe repair shops has declined by more than 90 percent in the last century, and only about 10 percent of Americans still get shoes repaired.

That doesn't mean business is slow for Merrill, however. His closest remaining competitors are in Clifton Park and Plattsburgh, giving him a monopoly on what's left of the market.

"My customers are usually in a good mood, because they're happy to find me," he said. "People bring me all sorts of things, anything that needs to be patched, sewn or fixed, because nobody repairs anything anymore."

Joe Podnorszki, a local landscaper, stopped in last week to pick up a pair of work boots that had been resoled. He has a tipping point for getting shoes repaired -- it's not worth it unless they cost more than $50. But he used to do things differently.

"I originally came from Budapest (Hungary)," he said, where, during the Communist era, many goods were scarce. "There, you almost had to get repairs."

Dress shoes used to be the bread and butter of the repair business, Merrill said, but people don't dress up as much as they used to. When they do, they often wear cheap imports that aren't worth repairing.

"I wear sneakers myself, because I'm on my feet all day," he said. "I know, it's funny, the shoe guy doesn't repair his own shoes!"

He still gets customers who find it worth repairing expensive dress shoes, but he has moved into other niches, too.

In the back of the shop, leather jackets bearing the emblems of several motorcycle clubs hang next to police jackets -- perhaps closer than some of them would like to be in real life, he notes with a grin. He also patches chaps, sews on zippers, restrings baseball gloves and even fixes scuba gear. He draws the line at larger projects.

"I've had people bring in old car seats and even a boat cover. I'm just not set up for that."

Recently, he's discovered a growing niche: orthopedic lifts.

"Hip replacement is a pretty common procedure these days, and when the bones heal up, they're not always level," he explained, as he brushed glue onto a 3/4-inch thick piece of rubber and pressed it against the sole of a white tennis shoe.

Other things haven't changed much. The stitching machines in Merrill's shop are at least half a century old, handed down from his grandfather, and he still relies on glue, sandpaper and elbow grease.

Although he gets brochures in the mail about trade shows, Merrill rarely pays attention. It's hard to imagine what new tricks they could teach him, anyway. He's been fixing shoes since he was 8 or 9, helping out in his grandfather's shop.

"It all seemed cool then, you know, the machines and all that," he said. "I just grew up with it. I don't have to think, I just do it."

On the other hand, Merrill said, it's not a dream job.

"People ask me how many shoes I've done in my life. I tell them if I knew the answer, I would probably throw myself in front of the next bus," he joked. "I mean, do I get up in the morning and say, 'Hey! I get to repair shoes!' No, but I don't mind it either. I like being my own boss."

He hopes his 16-year-old son will find an easier way to make a living but, personally, Merrill said he plans to stick with the business for a long time.

"At this point, I plan on going to the finish line with it," he said. "When they shovel dirt on me, I'm retired."

Barber retires after 40 years

Published in The Post-Star

April 1, 2007

QUEENSBURY -- Locks of white, gray and black hair mingled on the floor of Jack's Barber Shop, forming a soft carpet under Jack Wright's feet by mid-morning.

He didn't have time to stop and sweep them up. Even without an appointment book, he almost always had a customer in his old-fashioned barber's chair, and several more flipping through the hunting and fishing magazines in the waiting area.

Last week, all of them were talking about the same thing.

"I don't know what I'm gonna do, where I'm gonna go," complained John Hoey, 79, a longtime customer. "He's the best barber in the area."

After 40 years of barbering, Wright retired Friday, giving his last cuts and shaves at his Main Street shop near Exit 18.

"I came for the last call. I don't really need a haircut, but I figured I better get one while I can," said Jack Woods, 65, a retired school custodian from Corinth who came in Thursday morning.

"It's worth driving over here," Woods added. "I used to be on the Village Board, and he'd ask me how things were going in the village -- but a lot of the time, he'd know more about it than I did! They say women are gossips, but men are just as bad, you know."

Wright agreed.

"I hear more confessions than a priest does, I tell you!" he said, grinning. "And I have a few priests that come in, too!"

But, he said, whenever his wife asked him if he heard anything interesting that day, he'd just shake his head.

"I would tell her, nope, nobody said a thing," he said. "What goes on in the barbershop, stays in the barbershop."

Wright grew up in South Glens Falls and became a barber's apprentice in 1967, after four years in the Navy. He opened his own shop on Route 9 in 1971, and moved to Main Street in 1982.

Barbershops like this used to be a community gathering place, Wright said, but he has seen a lot change in the last few decades.

"That's the part of the business I miss, all the neighborhood people just coming in to chat," he said. "People today, they just want to get their haircut and leave. Everybody's in a hurry."

Wright smeared a bit of lather on the back of a customer's neck, wielding a straight-edge razor as calmly as a putty knife. A handmade sign above the mirror displayed the current prices: "Haircuts $9.00, Beard Trim $2.00"

"When I started out, haircuts were 75 cents," he said. "That was a few days ago, wasn't it, Jack?"

"Oh, yup," the white-haired man in the chair replied.

Time hasn't changed Wright's tools and techniques. Simple black combs and silver shears are still his staples; classic, clean men's cuts are his specialty. He prunes wild eyebrows, shapes sideburns and scrapes away stray neck hairs, often adding a splash of Bay Rum aftershave at the end -- "the stuff the old cowboys used," he says.

He keeps a stash of lollipops on hand for younger customers.

"It's neat to see the kids grow up. Some of them, now I'm cutting their sons' hair," he said. "But a lot of my older customers have passed away -- I just saw another one in the obituaries today. It's hard. I've been to a lot of funerals."

Wright thinks traditional barbers like himself might be a dying breed. Although barbershops have enjoyed a nostalgia-driven surge of patronage in recent years, their numbers declined drastically in the last half of the 20th century while beauty salons blossomed.

As of 2004, New York had nearly 144,000 licensed cosmetologists and only 8,021 barbers, according to the state Department of State.

Wright blames The Beatles, among other things.

"Back in those days when I first started out, we had the Beatles come along, and suddenly everybody wants long hair," he said. "Now, everyone wants barbers again, but there's not many of us left."

Jack Huskie, 76, has been coming to Wright for a dozen years, and was perturbed to hear of his retirement.

"Every time my barbers retire or die, I gotta find a new one, and it's hard!" he said.

Even Wright's newer customers were distressed to hear the shop would be closing.

"What? You're making me sad!" exclaimed Rico Rapisora, 38, who moved to the area from California a few years ago. "When you move from one place to another, and you're used to going to a barber, finding another one is very comforting," Rapisora said. "It's like home."

Wright, 65, said he's looking forward to spending more time at his own home, and outdoors.

"I've got a little fishing boat and I never have time to use it -- I didn't even get it in the water last year," he said. "I'm gonna do a little more fishing, hunting, golf and travel. My wife just retired, too, so we'll take some trips."

On Thursday, many of the customers who walked in were surprised to hear the shop was in its final days.

"He didn't check with us to see if he could retire!" said Wayne Carlton, 65. He sighed as he settled into Wright's chair.

"Cut 'er nice and short, Jack," he said. "It may be a long time before I find another barber."

The spirit of Shabat

Published on 1/7/2007 in THE POST-STAR

GLENS FALLS -- Peter Shabat doesn't look like a rich and powerful businessman. He looks more like the Maytag repairman, with a Jewish twist -- blue work pants and sneakers, a Carhartt vest embroidered with the words "Northway Service," and a faded black yarmulke that nearly blends into his dark hair.

His office is in a former feed store on South Street, near several bars and a tattoo parlor. Grimy fingerprints cover the cash register and photocopier, and a trickle of chicken feed occasionally lands on his desk from the ceiling.

He doesn't need to be there. He has enough money to retire. But while the Maytag man is known for having nothing to do, Shabat works at least 60 hours a week. He spends his days darting among his office, his pickup truck, and businesses around the region, checking up on malfunctioning bagel ovens and malfeasant tenants.

In his office, he is nearly always on the phone, though most of his conversations go like this: "Seeyouattwothankyoubye."

The only day he takes off is Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath -- "Shabbat" in Hebrew.

This is what Shabat, 55, calls "slowing down" after open-heart surgery several years ago.

He grew up in Israel, as his accent still reveals after 35 years here. He had little money when he arrived, but a wealth of motivation. He started an appliance repair business, which eventually grew to include restaurant equipment sales and service from three locations in Albany, Schenectady and Glens Falls.

By the 1990s, Shabat owned three hotels in Lake George and what he estimates was 80 percent of South Street's commercial real estate. He has sold many of his properties and downsized his repair business in recent years, but still owns four South Street buildings and handles most repair calls personally.

"When you're poor, you work hard and save...Now that I have the money, I can't stop working," he said. "What am I going to do, sit home? I have to use my hands; my mind."

His most notorious investment is the Madden Hotel, a boarding house with a reputation that matches its battered exterior. The tenants are mostly people with troubled histories, struggling with things like mental illness, substance abuse, debt and disability. As a result, Shabat admits, the Madden has a troubled history of its own.

"There's a lot of people coming in there who are just coming out of jail, having nothing...some have problems with drugs. I can't say there is no drugs there now, but it is a lot better than what it used to be," Shabat said.

Long-term tenants say they do their best to improve conditions by reporting those who damage the property or commit crimes. Those who end up on Shabat's list of "troublemakers" are banned.

"A place like that, it's what you make it," said Brian Black, who has lived at the Madden since 2001. "A lot of transients come through and say, 'It looks like he (Shabat) doesn't care about it, why should we?' But there are those of us who do...we used to have fights in there constantly, and drugs in and out of the place, but we've pretty much cleared that out now."

Black stepped into the lobby of the Madden a few minutes later, taking a reporter on a brief tour.

"Ah, shoot. Someone stole that lightbulb again," he said, glancing up.

Shabat said he keeps the building up to code, but it can be a challenge. When he first bought the Madden about 20 years ago, he renovated the place "from the ground up," he said.

"We made it nicer to begin with, but it didn't do any good. They break it, we fix it. They break it, we fix it. It gets expensive," he said. "Some people keep their rooms nice, but others are like animals, punching holes in the sheetrock and breaking doors."

The property is for sale, but Shabat said he won't sell it unless the buyer agrees to provide housing for the current Madden tenants. He hopes to work out a deal with the city.

"I could close that hotel, and it's never going to affect me financially, believe me. But there's a lot of people who, either mentally or physically, have no place to go," he said. "What would happen to them?"

Black, who is disabled by vision loss, said he, for one, doesn't know what he would do.

"If the Madden closed, I haven't a clue where I'd go. It would be a serious inconvenience, because right now I've got everything a stone's throw away," he said.

Shabat said he's "not desperate to sell," although there are days when the property is more trouble than its worth. Evicted tenants have retaliated with everything from swastikas to baseball bats, and the tires of his truck have been slashed several times.

"I don't think anybody else is going to take as much abuse as me," he said with a wry smile. "But you can't throw out the whole bunch because of a few bad apples. You can't give up."

He also insists that any potential buyer agree to keep renting space to the adjacent soup kitchen, called The Open Door.

Last year, a portion of the Madden's brick facade crumbled and fell through the roof of The Open Door, nearly landing on Rev. Bruce Hersey, the Open Door's director. But the falling wall didn't damage Hersey's opinion of Shabat.

"I've watched him over the years, and quietly, he has been very generous and kind," Hersey said, explaining that Shabat was the only South Street landlord to welcome the soup kitchen when Hersey started it from the back of a van about 15 years ago.

"He has come by numerous times to fix equipment for free," Hersey said. "And on Christmas day, he and his Jewish friends took care of feeding people so we could have a day off."

Shabat is an Orthodox Jew, the youngest of nine children born to North African immigrants in the Israeli village of Beit Shemesh, near Jerusalem. "I started working when I was 9 years old in a little market, and picked vegetables in the summer," he said. "I paid for my own bar mitzvah. My parents were very poor."

Shabat joined the Israeli Air Force at 15, and was still a teenager when he fought in the Six-Day War of 1967. When the Air Force sent him to Pensacola, Fla. for a training exercise a few years later, he fell in love with a girl named Lynne who vacationing there from Glens Falls with her family.

"I thought when I came here, it was only going to be for a year or so, but things change," he said.

He moved to Glens Falls, married Lynne and had two sons, but they divorced a few years later. He remarried and had a daughter, then lost his second wife to cancer. His children are grown now, have jobs in law and health care, and live in other states.

"I don't really want to talk about all of that," Shabat said, a weary look in his eyes.

Light returns to his eyes at the mention of another woman -- Ornit Reindorp, his longtime girlfriend. She also grew up in Israel, and served a year in the Army there before moving to her mother's hometown of Glens Falls about 15 years ago.

Shabat heard of her arrival from other members of the local Jewish community, and welcomed her to the neighborhood with what Reindorp considered a precious gift.

"He came over with an Israeli newspaper!" she remembered, her hazel eyes glowing.

When Reindorp stopped by the soup kitchen during a recent weekday lunch, many of the regulars greeted her affectionately. She said many of them have asked Shabat for help in the past, and they usually receive it, under certain conditions.

"If you come up to him and ask him for five bucks, he'll give it to you...but you have to show that you are willing to work for it. I mean, when he came to Glens Falls, he had holes in his shoes, he was so poor. But he was willing to work," she said.

Elvis Whorf, 25, said Shabat has "always been a motivator" for him to get his life on the right track.

"I can remember many times when I've been without a place to stay, and Peter's said, 'Hey, I've got a room.' He worked with me on rent when I couldn't pay it all at once," said Whorf. "I think he's got a heart of gold."

Reindorp looked thoughtful. "He has a unique personality," she said. "I never met a person with so much patience."

That patience does have its limits, however, as Shabat noted.

"I really don't have any conflicts with people, unless they don't pay their rent or bills," he said. "Then, I take them to court."

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