Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Shoemakers Row: Oregon Custom Shoemakers Follow in the Footsteps of an Age-Old Tradition

D.W. Frommer pulls a wooden cigar box from a shelf in his Redmond shop and flips the top to reveal a bundle of boar bristles and a bar of pine resin. The grey-bearded shoemaker, who works by traditional methods whenever possible, uses the bristles as sewing needles and the resin as wax for his linen thread.

When he was first establishing himself in the trade in the early 1970s, the now sixty-seven- -year-old made a decision that has shaped his entire shoemaking career—to focus on craft rather than money. “You’re not looking for efficiency in making a bespoke shoe,” he says. “You’re looking for quality and excellence.”

Over decades of making cowboy boots and, more recently, high-end dress shoes, Frommer has earned top honors in numerous shoemaking competitions, written several books on boot-making techniques and established an organization called The Honourable Cordwainers’ Company, an online forum for the trade.

His customers range from Great Basin cowboys to European businessmen, and they pay $1,800 to $7,000 for dress shoes and cowboy boots, depending on leather quality and intricacy of design.

Relying mostly on the methods of his predecessors, Frommer achieves impressive results. The sea-green-and-cream-colored cowboy boots made of ostrich and water buffalo, and the high-heeled black lace-ups with the deep red trim, have tight stitches, beautiful lines and subtle, classic colors and designs.

Photos by Jeff Kennedy

After studying for a few years at the University of Minnesota and serving in the U.S. Army paratroopers in Vietnam, Frommer secured an apprenticeship with a saddle-maker in Albany, Oregon. A few years later, hoping to learn to build shoes himself, he sought the counsel of boot-maker Mike Ives in Billings, Montana.

Frommer studied with Ives for a couple of weeks in 1976, then returned to Oregon and converted the old shed on his property into a small workshop. He began taking orders, even for boots he did not know how to make. “I was always pushing the envelope,” he says.

With more than forty years in the trade, Frommer has watched the shoemaking infrastructure in the United States all but dry up. Most American tanneries folded when shoe production emigrated to Asia. Five U.S. companies produced "lasts"—the foot-shaped models on which cordwainers construct shoes—when he started. Now only Jones & Vining in Arkansas remains. Because most shoemaking resources have been outsourced or are outdated, Frommer orders most of his leathers from Europe and buys replacement hand tools as antiques.

“You can’t have that stuff go away and have the tradition go forward,” Frommer says. “Once the infrastructure is gone, it’s gone forever. All we can do is preserve the tradition through books, articles and examples of good work so sometime after Armageddon, someone can come along and pick it up again.”

On most days, Frommer works on the ground floor of the two-story workshop in his backyard, shaping last forms, sewing insoles and affixing the bottoms of shoes, while his wife, Randee, stitches uppers in the cleaner space upstairs.

“Everyone wants to be an artist, but I don’t,” Frommer says. “I’m happy being a craftsman. To be a craftsman is to do something really well, really painstakingly, with the knowledge that what you do is not only going to last, but it’s going to give satisfaction.”