Saving Soles

Salisbury icon Buck Cline is calling it quits after 57 years in the shoe repair business
By Kathy Chaffin
Salisbury Post

One day, when the manager of JCPenney was over at Cline’s Shoe Service getting some shoes repaired, Buck Cline asked him if he had any two-pocket work shirts in the store.

That was back in the good old days of downtown Salisbury, before the larger retailers relocated to the mall.

The manager said he did, but that Cline had better hurry — there weren’t many left and the manufacturers were going to stop making them with two pockets.

When Cline closed up his East Innes Street shop, he went to Penney’s and found 18 of the shirts in his size. He bought every one, paying $1.98 apiece.
“And do you know I’m still wearing them?” he says.

The fact is, Cline was wearing a blue-and-white plaid, two-pocket shirt when columnist Rose Post and Post photographer Wayne Hinshaw went to do a story on him seven years ago. And he was wearing the same shirt when Hinshaw and I went to do a story about his retiring.

Cline doesn’t realize it until he looks at the photograph Virgil Earnhardt had framed for him after the first story ran. He points out the shirt, amused.

There’s something appropriate about 76-year-old Cline wearing the same shirt for both interviews. Good things are made to last.

Take shoes, for instance.

Shoes used to be made well, according to Cline.

“You really can’t buy any decent shoes now,” he says, “not unless you pay $300, $400 a pair for them. Now they’ve got a whole bunch of junk.

“A lot of people have foot problems because of the shoes they’re wearing.”

Cline bought the Allen-Edmonds shoes he wears to work every day 30-some years ago for $125 at Goodnight’s, a men’s clothing store open downtown from 1950 to 1978.

“I’ve resoled them several times,” he says. “Made them new.”

Allen-Edmonds shoes today sell for close to $300.

It was a good thing shoes were made to last when Cline first started his business, because many people only had one pair. “I fixed many a pair while they waited,” he says.

On Saturdays, the small lobby at Cline’s Shoe Service at 110 E. Innes would be packed with kids waiting to get their shoes resoled. “That was their only day off from school,” he says, “and that was their only pair of shoes.”

Many children weren’t allowed to wear their shoes in the summer because it would wear them out sooner. “It was barefoot time,” Cline says.

“That changed a good bit 10 to 15 years ago,” he says. “People got to where they had two pairs, three pairs.”

Today, people have shoes of all styles and colors. “I have 10 to 15 pairs myself now,” he says.

Cline, who answers questions between waiting on customers, hasn’t told many people he is retiring.

Joyce Evans, who lives in Neel Estates, didn’t find out until she stopped by to pick up some shoes.

“I’ve been knowing Mr. Cline a long time,” she says to the photographer and me.

“You’ve been in the business a long time,” she says to Cline.

“Sure have,” he says. “Saved a lot of soles. That used to be my motto.”

Cline gave out pencils advertising the business that read: “We’re shoe doctors. We heel them, we save their soles and attend their dyeing.”

It has been several years since Cline has dyed any shoes, but he continues to sell several colors of dye. “It used to be, every time they had a wedding, I’d do the whole deal,” he says.

It’s not long before Geraline Shoaf of Salisbury stops by to pick up a pocketbook Cline had repaired.

Shoaf says she wondered if Cline was retiring when she saw us there. She started bringing shoes and pocketbooks to him when she was a teen-ager, she says, and started back as soon as she moved back to the area after living away for 26 years.

“He’s been a good one,” she says. “You don’t ever have to bring anything back.”

“We’ll miss you,” Shoaf says to Cline on her way out the door.

Sara Sherrill of Rockwell is the third customer to stop by during the interview, and she has a prescription from her orthopedist in Winston-Salem for Cline to add 3-1/2 inches to one of her shoes. The raised shoe has helped her to walk since she underwent surgery to remove cancer from her femur in 1978.

“I sure am glad I ran it over,” she says when she hears Cline’s news. “This is going to be sad.”

But Sherrill says she doesn’t blame anybody for retiring. “They deserve it after working all these years.”

Cline has been nationally certified as an orthopedic shoe serviceman since September 29, 1964.

During the polio epidemic, Cline says he worked with many children, fitting them with braces, special shoes, “whatever the doctor ordered” to try to help them walk. “A lot of people had polio,” he says.

Today, 20 percent of his business is orthopedic prescriptions.

“I feel sorry for those people because I don’t know how they’re going to get it done,” he says. “Nobody else does it. Statesville’s the only place I know to get it done.”

Cline’s start in the shoe service business dates back to his childhood. One of his neighbors in Concord, C.G. Coley, ran a shoe shop.

“I rode a bicycle all the time, so he hired me to pick up and deliver his shoes,” he says. “I’d stand around and wait on him to finish so I could take them back, and I got started working.”

When he graduated from Concord High School in 1938, Cline took a first-shift job at Cannon Mills and a second-shift job at Ralph Dry’s City Shoe Shop.

Dry sold out to J.S. Lee, who also bought the East Innes Street shop owned by Dry’s brother, Charlie, on the condition that Cline would run it.

Cline had been married a year to Mae Cato, who grew up in the same neighborhood, when he took over the store on April 18, 1941.

If Cline didn’t have to serve in World War II, Lee said he would sell him the shop for the price he paid for it.

But like many young men his age, Melvin G. Cline received his draft notice from the Army, earning the nickname “Buck Private” by friend Robert Cook.

The name “Buck” stuck, but a twist of fate prevented him from serving. “I had appendicitis at the right time,” he says.

After undergoing blood work as part of a physical examination at Fort Bragg, Cline was sent back home. “When I got here to Salisbury, I felt good but I could not get up off the bus seat,” he says.

The driver, who had stopped at a police stand that used to be on the corner at the Wallace Building at 2 a.m., had to help him off. Cline was lying on the sidewalk in front of the building when Dr. Glenn Choate, who had an office there, walked out.
He offered to take Cline to the hospital and asked the bus driver and police officer on duty to help get him in the car.

At the hospital, Cline was told he needed emergency surgery for appendicitis. “They couldn’t wait,” he says.

The doctor asked Cline if he had called his wife, who was at home with their young daughter, Judy. He said yes, but he hadn’t. He didn’t want to worry her in the middle of the night.

By the time he had a nurse to call Mae the next morning, Cline says he was already sitting up. He recovered quickly and took his employer up on his offer to sell him the business.

That was 1942, and he has been working on shoes and other leather goods there ever since.

“I was open from 7 in the mornings until 7 at night for years and years and years,” he says.

The store traditionally closed for holidays, as well as a week in July for vacation for Cline and his family, which grew to four with the birth of Melvin G. Jr., who ultimately became known as “Bucky.”

Cline had six employees working for him at one time, but as business dropped when people began buying new shoes instead of getting their old ones repaired, he found he could handle it by himself.

About 10 years ago, Cline semi-retired, cutting his hours from 7:30 to noon Monday through Friday.

Cline admits to being sad about his upcoming retirement. “You can’t help but be sad,” he says. “I hate to leave, especially for the crippled people, but I can’t stay here forever, you know.

“I figured I’d better get out while I had a chance to do it.”

An offer from Bob Dietz, owner of Dee’s Jewelers next door, prompted Cline to go ahead and call it quits.

“It took me a year to convince him,” says Dietz, who stopped by during the interview. “We have some exciting plans for downtown Salisbury, and I’m very glad to be purchasing another building with the things that are going on in downtown Salisbury.”

Dietz says it will take about six weeks to remodel the 16-by-28.5, three-story shop. “We have some exciting plans to announce the first of November.”

The last day of business for Cline’s Shoe Service will be September 17, a week from today.

“He’ll be flooded the last week with shoes,” Dietz says.

“You’re an icon in Salisbury,” he says to Cline. “Fifty-seven years!”

Cline says he can’t think of anybody else in downtown Salisbury who has been there as long as he has.

Now that he’s retiring, Cline says Mae will probably have a “honey-do list” for him at home. “Mow the grass and this, that and the other.”

Before he closes up shop, Cline says he plans to give any shoes that haven’t been claimed to the Salvation Army.

“I need to take this picture home and give it to my grandchildren,” Cline says of the framed photograph that accompanied the last story about him.

He and Mae have five grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Bucky and his wife still live in Salisbury, while Judy Cline Barker lives in Charlotte.

The framed advertisement of an old-time shoe repairman using Biltrite Rubber Heels and Shoes products will come down after 40 years on the wall along with a painting of wild horses on the opposite wall that Bucky gave to him during his first year at N.C. State.

“Everything in here’s antique,” Cline says. “We’re all antiques.”

Now that he’s retiring, Cline admits that he has never enforced the notice on front of the counter reading: “Please don’t ask for shoes without claim check — $5.00 charge.”

Not even once, he says.