Tom Rhine hasn’t read the studies that show over the past few years the incarceration and unemployment rates for black men have soared.
When I stopped at Rhine’s Shoe and Boot Repair on East 17th Avenue to talk to him about the bleak realities for black men in America, he confronted the information matter-of-factly, just like he does a pile of worn stilettos on the shelf beside him. Rhine’s personal philosophy is as plain as the button pinned to his tattered work coat. It says, “Don’t panic.”
Six days a week, every week of the year, he turns on the little TV to keep him company and gets to work. He cuts new soles and heel pads – dozens of them a day – dips a brush into a pot and slathers glue on a worn snakeskin pump, a battered wingtip, a pair of well-loved hiking boots, and makes them like new. He polishes, mends tears and replaces frayed laces, one after another, on his feet for hours, always hustling under the pressure of so many promises to keep.
“My dad worked in a lumberyard,” he said. “I never remember him missing a day of work – ever – sick or not. I think that’s why I’d always rather be at work.”
Rhine’s been fixing shoes for 38 years, plying a trade he learned in high school in Texas. “I really didn’t think about college,” he said. “I was not that good a student.” Not like his sons.
“They’re doing good,” he said. He has their certificates of achievement hanging on the wall behind the cash register.
The older, Tommy Jr., is a freshman at Morehouse College in Atlanta. Daniel, 17, doesn’t know where he’ll go to college when he graduates from West High School, but he knows he’ll go.
“He got all A’s and B’s last time,” said Rhine. “Well, except for a C in physics, but they tell me that’s pretty hard.”
After he and their mother divorced, the boys lived with her, and Rhine moved into a tiny studio apartment near the shop. “She remarried, and it wasn’t working out, so the boys moved in with me.”
They lived in the studio for three years until Rhine could afford a bigger place. “It was like an army barracks, but it worked out,” he said. The shop’s doorbell rings, and Rhine pauses to answer it.
Tommy Jr. played football at East, he said, “but I’m here 24/7, so I hardly never got a chance to go to school functions.” Still, he met a couple of the teachers, “and they told me they were good kids.
“It makes you feel good.”
Over the years, both boys have worked in the shop, polishing shoes, cleaning, taking care of customers. “They worked hard, and I paid ’em just like someone else. I always gave them money if they needed it,” Rhine said. “I don’t want them to be tempted to go out and steal.”
His sons aren’t sure what they want to do after college. “You know kids now,” he said. “They need time.”
Periodically, they’ve asked him to teach them shoe repair. “I like what I do. This is a good trade. But I’ve never pushed them to go into it. I want my kids to do something better.”
The doorbell rings. Rhine adds a bag of beat-up shoes to the pile with the ripped Uggs, the worn red boots, the work shoes that still have a few more miles in them.
Sure, there have been problems. Racial discrimination exists, no question, Rhine said. His kids have had to deal with that just like everybody else, but he’s not inclined to talk about it much.
“I just got a letter the other day from Tommy Jr. I send him a little note once a week or something, and I’ve paid a couple of his phone bills.”
Rhine pounds another new heel on an old shoe and tosses it on the “finished” pile. “My friends tell me all the time how good the boys are. I get a little choked up talking about them sometimes.”
Finally I ask him: What’s your secret? How did your sons beat the odds?
“I don’t know. I just treated them like adults and expected them to be independent, to use their heads. That’s all.”
The doorbell rings. He lays his hammer on the workbench and meets another customer in the cluttered shop. The doorbell keeps ringing, the customers keep coming and, just like with his sons, everybody knows Tom Rhine will always be there when they need him. Always.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-820-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
