Walking away

Jan Brockamp has fixed many a sole for many a soul over the years.

In fact, if you lined up all the shoes she’s hit with a hammer, dabbed with a touch of polish and stitched with a needle, they’d probably fill all the streets of downtown Eugene.

But almost five decades of standing to fix the footwear of others has taken a toll on Brockamp, who along with her husband, Cal, has run Jan’s Specialty Shoe Service in three different downtown locations since 1984. She’s actually been in the business since 1962, when she began learning the shoe-fixing trade from her father when she was a teenager.

And now, her knees are shot. So much so that she will have knee-replacement surgery on both this fall.

That’s why today is the final day for the shop — ever. It also marks the end of a family business whose roots go back more than a half-century.

“It’s going to be hard,” said Jan Brockamp, 63. “More than the work, I’ll miss the people.”

Shoe repair shops are mostly anachronisms in the 21st century. When her shop was profiled in a Register-Guard special section five years ago, Brockamp said it was pretty much a dying industry.

On Tuesday, however, she said this: “We’ve managed to stay really busy the last few years.” In a sign of the hard recessionary times, more and more people started bringing in their old shoes, sometimes with cobwebs on them, for repairs instead of buying expensive new shoes.

Loyal customers have been coming into the shop all week to say goodbye and wonder where they will go now to get their shoes repaired.

The Brockamps’ shop has been at its present location at 804 Olive St. since 1999. It’s just across the street from where Jan’s late father, Ralph Miller, opened Ralph’s Shoe Repair at 92 W. Eighth Ave. — now a parking lot — in the early 1950s.

Miller closed his shop in 1983, a couple of years before he died. By then it had moved to near West 11th Avenue and Charnelton Street. Jan, who had worked for her father for more than 20 years, took a year off before she and Cal opened Jan’s on East Broadway, between Pearl and Oak streets. They later moved to a spot on East 11th Avenue, between High and Pearl streets, before moving to the space that will close its doors for good today.

The Brockamps considered finding someone to take over the business. “There just aren’t a lot of people who do what we do anymore,” Jan said. There appear to be just three shoe repair shops left in Eugene: Jim the Shoe Doctor a couple of blocks south on Olive Street; Sole Savers in west Eugene; and Baker’s Shoe & Clothing on Roosevelt Boulevard.

The Brockamps have two children, Kim Olson and Steve Brockamp, and four grandchildren, but none of them have any interest in running a shoe repair business.

Downtown memories

The shop has an enticing polish-and-glue aroma and conjures memories of a bygone era. The equipment, although functional, is not exactly modern. A shoe stretcher on a shelf could well be more than 80 years old, Jan said. Stacks of shoes with repair tags sit nearby — cowboy boots, dress shoes, sandals, a pair of red patent-leather pumps with 4-inch heels.

Much of the equipment, which the Brockamps plan to sell, is similar to what Ralph Miller used decades ago. He actually worked with Cal’s father, Herman Brockamp, at Lane’s Shoe Shop at 95 W. Eighth Ave. in about 1950, Cal Brockamp said. That shop is also long gone.

Then again, much of downtown as the Brockamps remember it is gone.

“It’s just not the same as it was,” Jan said. “The environment down here is not good. We get all these people down here who make you feel uncomfortable.”

The Brockamps have childhood memories from the 1950s of a downtown with a pulse. A downtown with “five and dime” stores; a doughnut shop on Willamette Street, between Seventh and Eighth avenues, where you could watch through the window as the doughnuts came off the conveyer belt; Foo’s Chinese restaurant on the same block; and kids and parents who did their back-to-school clothes shopping at places like Jay’s Clothes for Young Men on Charnelton Street.

Jan and Cal, who began dating after high school in the mid-1960s, and married in 1968, have known each other since they were toddlers. Cal grew up in Junction City, and Jan in Eugene, where she graduated from South Eugene High School in 1965.

Although the Brockamps’ business has always been a two-person operation, her father’s shop had 11 employees at one time. In addition to shoes, he did leather coats, too.

Evel dropped in

In fact, the most famous customer she ever served at her father’s shop did not come in to have his shoes fixed, but his costume. That was stuntman Evel Knievel, sometime between 1967 and 1970, the best she can recall. He was in town doing a show, probably at the Eugene Speedway — now long gone — and his red, white and blue suit got scuffed.

But it’s gotta be the shoes they’ll remember most. And the people who wore them.

“We’ve done some pretty fantastic shoes,” Cal said. “Jan worked on a clown shoe once for a lady from Hawaii.”

The Brockamps have kept the shop’s impending closure somewhat under wraps this summer. Lately, some newer customers have been saying: “You can’t quit — I just found you!” Cal said.

“It’s kind of a bittersweet thing here,” Jan said. “It’s hard for them,” Jan said of their customers. “They don’t feel comfortable (going somewhere else). They’ve been coming here for so many years.”

Peggy Ehlers walked in with her daughter, Ali, Tuesday, and saw the signs that said “No more repairs/Pick-up only.”

“So, no more repairs?” asked Ehlers, who teaches English as a second language in the Fern Ridge School District.

“What have you got?” Jan said.

Ehlers showed her a casual black shoe with the heel ripped out. Oh, what’s one more repair?

“I’m really going to miss you very much,” Ehlers said. “I’ve been coming to you for years and years.”

“I know,” Jan said before giving Ehlers a big hug. “It’s really going to be tough.”

Asked why she kept coming back for 15 years, Ehlers said: “Because she’s the best shoe repair person in the whole world.”