Heel and finishing department

Moving to and fro vigorously in his brown rocking chair and punctuating his explanations with gestures, Marcel Charron tells us about some of the stages involved in making a shoe.

Transcript:

It was Alexis who was the heeler.  He was on a machine.  Then that machine, you know, it took the shoe on the wooden last so the heeler’d flip the shoe upside down.  Me, when I was just a little guy, when I came out of trimming, what we called fittage, I went to work with Alexis Letendre.  Me, I’d glue the leather heels then I’d glue a rubber (a piece of rubber).  I put the rubber over the leather, like today’s heels.  The upper is leather and the bottom is rubber, so you don’t fall over.  Him, he’d put the heel there and there was another guy who worked with him, it was Gilles Perreault back then.  They called him Credo, that one.  Him, he’d put the nails in a thingamabob and when the thingamabob was full of nails, he pushed it.  The nails went down and then, my buddy Letendre, he’d place the heel and push a pedal.  Drivers, they called that, drivers, like pins, it went down into the metal and it nailed the heel.  There, he’d attach heels, attach heels, depending on what type of shoe it was.

After all that stuff was done, it wasn’t over, not by a long shot.  After, they had to, what did they call it back then?  They trimmed the heel so it looked good, because it was large and big.  There was a machine with knives that turned.  What did they call it?  And then, it was the sole’s turn, same deal.  The guys who did that, they were old, you know, lifelong tradesmen.  They took the knives.  They were knives that turned, that went around at maybe two or three thousand rpms.  They were pretty sharp: you couldn’t have a guy put his fingers there!  And then, it was him that shaped the shoe to even out the heel.  Because the heel, it was way bigger, once it was stitched, parts stuck out.  You had to be careful not to hit it wrong, or you might cut the stitching.

When the shoe was done there, it went to Father Houle.  Father Houle was the last one to get it so he could clean off all the glue.  The final polish was done on the office floor. When it left from there, it went downstairs to the office floor.  They called that treasers.  They had hot irons and they ran them over the leather because sometimes there were folds and it’d been sewn that way.