Shoeshiner
Encyclopedia
Shoeshiner or boot polisher is a profession in which a person polishes shoe
Shoe
A shoe is an item of footwear intended to protect and comfort the human foot while doing various activities. Shoes are also used as an item of decoration. The design of shoes has varied enormously through time and from culture to culture, with appearance originally being tied to function...

s with shoe polish
Shoe polish
Shoe polish , usually a waxy paste or a cream, is a consumer product used to polish, shine, waterproof, and restore the appearance of leather shoes or boots, thereby extending the footwear's life...

. They are often known as shoeshine boys because the job is traditionally that of a male child. In the leather fetish communities
Leather subculture
The leather subculture denotes practices and styles of dress organized around sexual activities. Wearing leather garments is one way that participants in this culture self-consciously distinguish themselves from mainstream sexual cultures...

, they are often called bootblacks. While the role is deprecated in much of Western civilisation there are children that earn an important wage for their family in many countries throughout the world. Some shoeshiners offer extra services, such as shoe repairs
Shoemaking
Shoemaking is the process of making footwear. Originally, shoes were made one at a time by hand. Traditional handicraft shoemaking has now been largely superseded in volume of shoes produced by industrial mass production of footwear, but not necessarily in quality, attention to detail, or...

 and general tailoring. Many well-known and high profile people started their working life as shoeshiners, including singers and presidents.

History

Shoe polish was not well known as a commercial product until the early 20th century. Throughout the late 19th century shoeshine boys plied their trade on the streets, particularly those in the cities of the United Kingdom.

Modern profession

The profession is common in many countries around the world, with the wage earned by the shoeshiner being a significant proportion of a family income, particularly when the father of the family has died or can no longer work. In Afghanistan
Afghanistan
Afghanistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located in the centre of Asia, forming South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. With a population of about 29 million, it has an area of , making it the 42nd most populous and 41st largest nation in the world...

 some children will work after school and can earn 100 Afghanis (around £1) each day. Many street children
Street children
A street child is a child who lives on the streets of a city, deprived of family care and protection. Most children on the streets are between the ages of about 5 and 17 years old.Street children live in junk boxes, parks or on the street itself...

 use shoeshining as their only means of income.

Some cities require shoeshiners to acquire licences in order to work legally. In August 2007 shoeshiners in Mumbai
Mumbai
Mumbai , formerly known as Bombay in English, is the capital of the Indian state of Maharashtra. It is the most populous city in India, and the fourth most populous city in the world, with a total metropolitan area population of approximately 20.5 million...

, India were told that they could no longer work on the railway stations due to "financial irregularities". Every Shoeshine Association was asked to reapply for their licence, with many worried that they would lose out to a rival.

Famous shoeshiners

Several high profile figures worked as a shoeshine boy at one point of their lives:
  • Mahmoud Ahmed
    Mahmoud Ahmed
    Mahmoud Ahmed is an Ethiopian singer of Gurage ancestry.-Biography:Born in Addis Ababa, Mahmoud shined shoes in that city before becoming a handyman at the Arizona Club, where he first sang professionally in the early 1960s...

     – Ethiopia
    Ethiopia
    Ethiopia , officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth-largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km2...

    n singer
  • James Brown
    James Brown
    James Joseph Brown was an American singer, songwriter, musician, and recording artist. He is the originator of Funk and is recognized as a major figure in the 20th century popular music for both his vocals and dancing. He has been referred to as "The Godfather of Soul," "Mr...

     – "The Godfather of Soul". He used to shine shoes and sing and dance on Ninth Street in Augusta, Georgia
    Augusta, Georgia
    Augusta is a consolidated city in the U.S. state of Georgia, located along the Savannah River. As of the 2010 census, the Augusta–Richmond County population was 195,844 not counting the unconsolidated cities of Hephzibah and Blythe.Augusta is the principal city of the Augusta-Richmond County...

    ; in 1993 the road was renamed "James Brown Boulevard" in his honour.
  • José Asunción Flores
    José Asunción Flores
    José Asunción Flores was a Paraguayan composer and creator of the Guarania music genre.-Early life:Flores was born in the poor neighborhood of La Chacarita, in Asunción. As a kid, he had to work as a paperboy and shoeshiner in order to help his mother with food and other necessities...

     – composer and creator of the guarania
    Guarania (music)
    Guarania is a style of music created in Paraguay by musician José Asunción Flores in 1925 with the purpose of expressing the character of the Paraguayan people...

     genre of music
  • Rush Limbaugh
    Rush Limbaugh
    Rush Hudson Limbaugh III is an American radio talk show host, conservative political commentator, and an opinion leader in American conservatism. He hosts The Rush Limbaugh Show which is aired throughout the U.S. on Premiere Radio Networks and is the highest-rated talk-radio program in the United...

    – conservative radio talk show host and pundit, shined shoes as a young boy to make spending money
  • Oscar Micheaux
    Oscar Micheaux
    Oscar Devereaux Micheaux was an American author, film director and independent producer of more than 44 films...

     – the first African American
    African American
    African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...

     filmmaker
  • Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
    Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
    Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva , known popularly as Lula, served as the 35th President of Brazil from 2003 to 2010.A founding member of the Workers' Party , he ran for President three times unsuccessfully, first in the 1989 election. Lula achieved victory in the 2002 election, and was inaugurated as...

     – later President of Brazil
  • Alejandro Toledo
    Alejandro Toledo
    Alejandro Celestino Toledo Manrique is a politician who was President of Peru from 2001 to 2006. He was elected in April 2001, defeating former President Alan García...

     – later President of Peru
  • Lee Trevino
    Lee Trevino
    Lee Buck Trevino is an American professional golfer. He is an icon for Mexican Americans, and is often referred to as "The Merry Mex" and "Supermex". He won six major championships over the course of his career.-Early life:...

     – professional golfer
    Professional golfer
    In golf the distinction between amateurs and professionals is rigorously maintained. An amateur who breaches the rules of amateur status may lose his or her amateur status. A golfer who has lost his or her amateur status may not play in amateur competitions until amateur status has been reinstated;...

  • Malcolm X
    Malcolm X
    Malcolm X , born Malcolm Little and also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz , was an African American Muslim minister and human rights activist. To his admirers he was a courageous advocate for the rights of African Americans, a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its...

     – worked as a shoeshine boy at a Lindy Hop
    Lindy Hop
    The Lindy Hop is an American social dance, from the swing dance family. It evolved in Harlem, New York City in the 1920s and '30s and originally evolved with the jazz music of that time. Lindy was a fusion of many dances that preceded it or were popular during its development but is mainly based...

     nightclub
    Nightclub
    A nightclub is an entertainment venue which usually operates late into the night...

     in New York City
  • Rod Blagojevich
    Rod Blagojevich
    Rod R. Blagojevich is an American politician who served as the 40th Governor of Illinois from 2003 to 2009. A Democrat, Blagojevich was a State Representative before being elected to the United States House of Representatives representing parts of Chicago...

     – later Governor of Illinois
    Governor of Illinois
    The Governor of Illinois is the chief executive of the State of Illinois and the various agencies and departments over which the officer has jurisdiction, as prescribed in the state constitution. It is a directly elected position, votes being cast by popular suffrage of residents of the state....


Film and television

  • Boot Polish
    Boot Polish (film)
    Boot Polish is a 1954 Hindi film directed by Prakash Arora and produced by Raj Kapoor. It won Best Film at the Filmfare Awards and was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.-Plot:...

    , a 1954 Hindi film
  • El Bolero de Raquel
    El bolero de Raquel
    El bolero de Raquel is a 1957 Mexican film starring Cantinflas, Manola Saavedra and Flor Silvestre...

    , 1956 Mexican film starring Cantinflas
    Cantinflas
    Fortino Mario Alfonso Moreno Reyes , was a Mexican comic film actor, producer, and screenwriter known professionally as Cantinflas. He often portrayed impoverished campesinos or a peasant of pelado origin...

  • Goodfellas
    Goodfellas
    Goodfellas is a 1990 American crime film directed by Martin Scorsese. It is a film adaptation of the 1986 non-fiction book Wiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi, who co-wrote the screenplay with Scorsese...

    , Martin Scorsese
    Martin Scorsese
    Martin Charles Scorsese is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation...

    's 1990 gangster film, features a scene in which hair trigger-tempered Lucchese crime family
    Lucchese crime family
    The Lucchese crime family is one of the "Five Families" that dominates organized crime activities in New York City, United States, within the nationwide criminal phenomenon known as the Mafia . The family originated in the early 1920s with Gaetano "Tommy" Reina serving as boss up until his murder...

     wiseguy, Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci
    Joe Pesci
    Joseph Frank "Joe" Pesci is an American actor, comedian, and musician.He is known for playing a variety of different roles, from violent mobsters to comedic leads to quirky sidekicks...

    ), brutally beats to death Gambino crime family
    Gambino crime family
    The Gambino crime family is one of the "Five Families" that dominates organized crime activities in New York City, United States, within the nationwide criminal phenomenon known as the Mafia . The group is named after Carlo Gambino, boss of the family at the time of the McClellan hearings in 1963...

     mobster, Billy Batts (Frank Vincent
    Frank Vincent
    Frank Vincent is an American actor, musician, author and entrepreneur. He is a favorite performer of director Martin Scorsese, having played important roles in three of Scorsese's most acclaimed films: Raging Bull , Goodfellas and Casino . He often plays a gangster and works both in features and...

    ), for insulting him about being a shoeshine boy in Tommy's younger days. The film is based on the real-life experiences of Henry Hill and the people he met through the Vario brothers
    Paul Vario
    Paul Vario was a caporegime of a crew in the Lucchese crime family. In the 1970s Vario held the position of consigliere in the family but later resigned. In 1980, longtime associate Henry Hill became a government witness and testified against Vario and members of his crew...

    , who owned a shoeshine stand and other businesses. In real life, William "Billy Batts" Devino
    William Devino
    William "Billy Batts" Devino was a New York mobster with the Gambino crime family who was a longtime friend of John Gotti in the 1960s...

     taunted Thomas "Two Gun Tommy" DeSimone
    Thomas DeSimone
    Thomas "Two-Gun Tommy" Anthony DeSimone was an Italian-American gangster and associate of the Lucchese crime family in New York. Also known as "Tommy D" or "Tommy Two-Guns", he was a grandson and nephew of Los Angeles mob bosses Rosario DeSimone and Frank DeSimone...

    , calling him "spit-shine Tommy". DeSimone retorted by yelling, "Shine these fuckin' shoes", and then executing Batts.
  • Shoe Shine Boy, a 1943 film musical
  • Shoeshine, a 1946 Italian film which received honours at the 1948 Academy Awards
    Academy Awards
    An Academy Award, also known as an Oscar, is an accolade bestowed by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize excellence of professionals in the film industry, including directors, actors, and writers...

  • Underdog, an animated television series in which an anthropomorphic dog, Shoeshine Boy, battles crime as a canine superhero
    Superhero
    A superhero is a type of stock character, possessing "extraordinary or superhuman powers", dedicated to protecting the public. Since the debut of the prototypical superhero Superman in 1938, stories of superheroes — ranging from brief episodic adventures to continuing years-long sagas —...

    .
  • Talking About Your Generation, a popular Australian Panel Show: "Bannanas can be used as shoe shine"
  • In one episode of Billy the Kid, Billy punched a shoeshiner in the face.
  • Parks and Recreation
    Parks and Recreation
    Parks and Recreation is an American comedy television series on NBC that focuses on Leslie Knope , a mid-level bureaucrat in the parks department of Pawnee, a fictional town in Indiana. Created by Greg Daniels and Michael Schur, the series debuted on April 9, 2009; it has run for three seasons and...

    , in which the character Andy is a shoeshiner in Pawnee City Hall.

Literature and publications

  • Confessions of a Wall Street Shoeshine Boy, a novel by Doug Stumpf currently being adapted into a screenplay
  • Ragged Dick
    Ragged Dick
    Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks is a Bildungsroman by Horatio Alger, Jr. serialized in Student and Schoolmate in 1867, and released as a full length novel in May 1868 by A. K. Loring. It was the first volume in the six volume Ragged Dick Series, and became Alger's...

    , an 1867 dime novel by Horatio Alger, Jr.
    Horatio Alger, Jr.
    Horatio Alger, Jr. was a prolific 19th-century American author, best known for his many formulaic juvenile novels about impoverished boys and their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of middle-class security and comfort through hard work, determination, courage, and honesty...

     about a poor but honest shoe shiner and his rise to middle-class comfort and respectability through good moral behavior, clean living, and determination. Shine!
    Shine! (musical)
    Shine! is a musical based on characters and situations found in the works of Horatio Alger, particularly Ragged Dick and Silas Snobden's Office Boy, respectively Alger's first best-seller and the one first printed in book form eighty years after it was first serialized in Argosy...

    , a musical based on Alger's work, particularly Ragged Dick, was produced in 1982.
  • Rajbahadur Bakhia the arch-villain in novels of Surender Mohan Pathak
    Surender Mohan Pathak
    Surender Mohan Pathak is an author of Hindi-language crime fiction with nearly 300 novels to his credit. His writing career, along with his full time job in Indian Telephone Industries, Delhi, began in the early 1960s with his brilliant Hindi translations of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, and...

    , was originally a shoeshiner at flora fountain
    Flora Fountain
    Flora Fountain, at the Hutatma Chowk , is an ornamentally and exquisitely sculpted architectural heritage monument located at the southern end of the historic Dadabhai Naoroji Road, called the Mile Long Road, at the Fort business district in the heart of South Mumbai, Mumbai, India...

     area of Mumbai
    Mumbai
    Mumbai , formerly known as Bombay in English, is the capital of the Indian state of Maharashtra. It is the most populous city in India, and the fourth most populous city in the world, with a total metropolitan area population of approximately 20.5 million...

    , and had his introduction with underworld
    Organized crime
    Organized crime or criminal organizations are transnational, national, or local groupings of highly centralized enterprises run by criminals for the purpose of engaging in illegal activity, most commonly for monetary profit. Some criminal organizations, such as terrorist organizations, are...

     over a payment dispute with a small time gangster who refused to pay him.
  • Scrooge McDuck
    Scrooge McDuck
    Scrooge McDuck is a cartoon character created in 1947 by Carl Barks and licensed by The Walt Disney Company. Scrooge is an anthropomorphic white duck with a yellow-orange bill, legs, and feet. He typically wears a red or blue frock coat, top hat, pince-nez glasses, and spats...

    , the Dell Comics
    Dell Comics
    Dell Comics was the comic book publishing arm of Dell Publishing, which got its start in pulp magazines. It published comics from 1929 to 1973. At its peak, it was the most prominent and successful American company in the medium...

     character, famously won his Number One Dime shining shoes.

Music

  • "Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy
    Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy
    "Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy" is a popular song written by Harry Stone and Jack Stapp and published in 1950.Many versions of the song charted in 1950, but the biggest was by Red Foley. His recording, produced by Owen Bradley, was released by Decca Records as catalog number 46205...

    ", a song performed by Bing Crosby
    Bing Crosby
    Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby was an American singer and actor. Crosby's trademark bass-baritone voice made him one of the best-selling recording artists of the 20th century, with over half a billion records in circulation....

     and Frank Sinatra
    Frank Sinatra
    Francis Albert "Frank" Sinatra was an American singer and actor.Beginning his musical career in the swing era with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, Sinatra became an unprecedentedly successful solo artist in the early to mid-1940s, after being signed to Columbia Records in 1943. Being the idol of the...

     amongst others

External links

  • Luard, Tim. BBC News
    BBC News
    BBC News is the department of the British Broadcasting Corporation responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs. The department is the world's largest broadcast news organisation and generates about 120 hours of radio and television output each day, as well as online...

    . 16 September 2004. "China diary: Shanghai shoeshine".
  • BBC News. 28 September 2004. "Belfast Shoe Shine Boy".
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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