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I Will Never Forget My First Pair of Converse All Stars
I teach writing at a community college in upstate New York, and in recent years, I’ve noticed a surprising trend in women’s footwear. Normally, I don’t pay much attention to women’s footwear, but now, some female students are wearing the same footwear that I used to wear when I was a high-school athlete in Amsterdam, New York, in the mid 1960’s: Converse All Star sneakers.
“Cons,” we used to call them, were the white canvas, high-top sneakers with the blue star in the ankle patch and the name “Chuck Taylor” around the star. Taylor was the primary salesperson for Converse early on. A member of the basketball team that Converse sponsored in the 1920’s, he made suggestions for the comfort of the shoe that helped make it one of the best-selling basketball shoes of all time.
In the 1960s, these sneakers were the most popular basketball sneaker on the market, and I couldn’t wait to buy my first pair. As I recall, Converse sneakers cost about ten dollars in 1965, and when I made the junior varsity basketball team as a freshman in high school, I was all set to use my paper-route money to buy them. Ten dollars, though, was a lot of money for a 14-year-old boy, and at the last minute, I changed my mind. I bought a cheaper pair for about three dollars, and I regretted my decision immediately after I wore those sneakers for the first…
