New Haven Independent

In many ways, this is a store that marketing has forgotten, a place filled with genuine pleasure in human interactions. “I just love what I do,” said Frank, “and the part I like best,” he said, while serving customers amid sweet leathery-smelling stacks of shoes and racks of purses everywhere, “is the people. They’re just so nice and interesting, and rewarding.”

Above two totems of boots that seem to teeter beside two ancient chairs in the entryway are eight-by-ten glossies of people whose feet Frank has shod. There’s Marie Osmond, who was doing a show at the Shubert, across the street from Star, and whom somebody had provided with three different pairs of shoes to dance in. None of them fit. “They were killing her,” said Frank, “so someone had heard of us and told the wardrobe mistress, ‘When you come to New Haven, go to Frank’s.’ Well, Marie and the wardrobe mistress came over, and we fixed her up.” Likewise, Judd Hirsch, and Cesar Pelli. President Rick Levin of Yale (whose photo has not yet made it to Star’s wall) is among many other clients from the university who make up about a third of the customer base. “Rick Levin has really good taste in shoes,” Frank said.

Frank, an extraordinarily youthful 76, took over from his father, who established the business in 1929 on Crown Street. His father, age 19, and his brother arrived in New Haven in 1917 from Messina, toward the end of the great Italian immigration. They both got jobs in the Lionel plant working on bicycles. Frank remembers that his father devised a way to put the spokes in the wheels more efficiently and got a raise to $5 a week, a fortune. After work they came downtown and began, in Frank’s phrase, to hang out with a German shoemaker on Temple Street. The German taught both young men the trade. Eventually they opened their own stores, and succeeded.

When Al Jolson came to the Shubert with a show titled either You’re in the Army Now or This is the Army (Purpora wasn’t sure), there were suddenly 120 pairs of army boots whose leather bottoms needed, immediately, to be replaced with rubber, or the dancers would be slipping and sliding across the stage. “There was so much work, we had to send it out.”

By the way, this advertisement for the store that Frank is holding, from the New Haven Register, says soles and heels cost 83 cents. That was 1933. Prices are a little more expensive now, but the atmosphere in the store is so friendly, the monetary transaction seems almost incidental or out of place. Purpora said that his leather supplier tells him almost all other shoe repair places now require a deposit in advance of work. Star never does. Over time, of course, a number of shoes and bags are not picked up. Frank sells them, putting them, without a price, in his old-fashioned window. People come in and make an offer. You negotiate until, you, the customer, are happy. Then Frank puts the shoes in a sturdy old paper bag, of the kind a mom or pop grocer would use in a Bernard Malamud short story. If after several months shoes are not picked up, Purpora contributes them to the Salvation Army or Goodwill.

Another major reason this store is good for the soul as well as the sole is this man. James Walker has been working with Frank for 26 years. “We’re like brothers, ” said Walker, who grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and, like Frank’s father, learned the trade by hanging out at the shoe repair shop, but in his case, that of a white man in the segregated South. “I started by shining shoes, then I replaced soles, and I learned the whole thing. I taught shoe repair at Randolph Macon High School in Richmond after I graduated from the place,” Walker said in a tone still soft and Southern despite decades in New Haven, including six years at the Winchester plant, where he made bullets for the M-22 rifle.

Working on shoes is better than bullets? “I just love it here,” Walker answered.

Then Walker excused himself, as a Yale history graduate student, Ken Loisette, came in to pick up his shoes. Walker searched in the pile and couldn’t find them. He called to Purpora for assistance. “You can’t find ‘em?” Frank said in his booming voice. “Did we sell ‘em, Jimmy?” Shoemakers, customer, and reporter then went into the interior of the store and combined efforts to find Loisette’s shoes. It was important to find them because, Loisette said, it is important to him to take care of his shoes. That was one of Loisette’s father’s precepts to him before he left home to come to Yale to study the history of the French Enlightenment

While the search went on, Loisette said that Dan Brown, in The DaVinci Code, was full of nonsense, because there was absolutely no connection between the Knights Templar and the Free Masons.

“Here they are,” shouted Frank, “right in front of us.” Then Loisette and Purpora and Walker had a long discussion about the superiority of cream over wax for shoe maintenance. Wax clogs the surface of the leather so the shoe can’t breathe. Loisette said he had been coming to Star for six years and could not imagine life in New Haven otherwise.

A new customer came in. Sean Woodward, who sells specialized packaging, was meeting friends from Café Adulis. Before joining them over at the Pilot Pen Tournament, he needed a small repair and a quick shine. He went past the blue neon clog in the window, and into the store, where Frank looked up and smiled.