Shine
PDNB Gallery
1202 Dragon Street Dallas 75207
Through November 14

I wrote my mother after I saw Shine at PDNB, a collection of vintage photographs by various photographers who captured the young and spirited shoe shine boys of the last century, as well as a number of shoe shine boxes. I needed to ask my mom some questions to clarify the story of my Italian grandfather who worked as a shoe shine as a young boy in Chicago during the Great Depression. I’d grown up hearing stories about Bumpa, as he was affectionately known, and his shoe shine days, and it was remembering these stories that drove me to the gallery in the first place: a way of seeing into my grandfather’s own childhood through the lives of others.

Shine is a beautiful show, the black and white photographs inhabiting PDNB’s sleek space on Dragon Street with powerful authority that describes the American dream in a way that transcends nostalgia. The rough-hewn, often homemade shoe shine boxes that run in tandem with the photos add a palpable, human texture to the show, playing off the crisp clarity of the pictures while also reiterating the shabbiness of their subjects: poor young boys or men who took up post on street corners around the country in hopes of making a few bucks buffing strangers’ leather shoes. These photographs, by the likes of John Albek, Walker Evans and Ruth Orkin, relate the tenacity of these entrepreneurial shoe shiners who would hawk customers to their stand with wit, finesse and an earnestness that has come to define the Greatest Generation.

Shoeshine Boy, Getting a Customer, 1948 Photo by Ruth Orkin

Looking at these photos, there’s no wonder why so many of these kids grew up to be savvy businessmen, just as my own grandfather did. When I asked my mom for a few details about him, she related a story that I think enriches these photographs with the particular. I’ll let her tell Bumpa’s story here, one that was so much like his fellow shoe shiners on view in Shine.

“Shoe Shine Boy”

Daddy was nine when he came from Sicily, 1928, from Santa Elizabeta, about 10 miles from Agrigento. He docked at Ellis Island – Nana, Uncle Mario (7) and he – and then, after going through customs, being checked for lice, etc. they took a train to Chicago to meet my grandfather whom neither boy even remembered. Nanu had worked in Chicago seven years as a ditch digger to save money for them to come over. They moved into a house in an alley in Bridgeport, Mayor Daley’s neighborhood on the South side with the smell of the stockyards all around them. Someone from the Mafia offered to help them get set up, but, as far as I can tell, your great-grandfather would have nothing to do with the man.

Shoeshine Boy, Getting Paid, 1948 Photo by Ruth Orkin

They went to public school, and the boys had to learn to speak English right away. Shortly after getting settled – I’m not sure how long – Daddy saw he had to work to feed the family. My grandmother was pregnant with Aunt Marian, who just turned 80, by the way. I don’t know if his father supplied him the polish and cart for his job, if it was his idea or what, but I am very clear about the fact that he would catch a ride with the milkman on his horse driven cart at 4 or 4:30 in the morning and would get dropped off at the train station or at State and Madison parked near where one of the busy L’s were, and he would shine shoes for three hours before he went to school every morning. He would work after school too during the rush hour. He saved his money so that by thirteen he could buy an accordion. He was taught by a kind black guy, and he would practice in the basement. I don’t believe his father was very happy about this turn in his vocation.

Before he was fourteen he had his own band, and he would play clubs until late at night and then go to school in the morning. He was evidently very thin, and one of his teachers whom he told me about many, many times noticed his malnutrition and sent him to Arden Shores camp for boys where he was properly fed and exercised. He loved this woman, and later, when Granny and he married, they honeymooned at the camp. The teacher was one of the honored guests at their wedding. I regret deeply that I never wrote down her name or recorded what my father told me. Though I was always respectful and interested, I was a typical child who knew I would hear the story again, and I had other things to do. I thought he would live forever.

Shoeshine Boy, Street Scene, 1948 Photo by Ruth Orkin

It was until my fourth daughter Sarah was a toddler, when Dadddy was a millionare, that all the shoe stories came back. I walked in the living room in Houston after nursing a new born Therese, and I saw Sarah on Daddy’s knee as he sang to her “Shoe shine boy, you worked hard all day, shoe shine boy, got no time to play, every little nickle counts, God bless you, shoe shine boy.” Sarah remembers the tune too. I had never heard it before. At that moment I realized with a pang that that was my Dad. He never had a childhood. Look at his face in the picture in the glass bookcase in my bedroom. You’ll see the look of hard duty on his face. But when he sang that song to Sarah, there was no bitterness. Just a sweet crooning, and I was grateful.

–Virginia Arbery