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PORTAGE PATHWAYS: Women in heels target of Portage tempest in 1961

Ajouté le 28/3/2011

By Roger J. Di Paolo | Record-Courier Editor

Buell Graven wasn’t one to tiptoe around the issue.

American women were destroying American homes, Kent’s building inspector warned.

Or at least their shoes were. Specifically the spike-heeled ones that were in fashion in 1961.

The solution? A ban on the offending footwear.

Barring that, Graven suggested borrowing “the time-honored custom of the Japanese” and ordering women “to remove their shoes at the front door.”

There’s no way of telling, 50 years later, if Graven was serious about his suggestion — there may have been more than a bit of tongue in cheek in his call for “immediate emergency legislation” to ban spike heels — but it made good copy for the Record-Courier during what evidently was a slow news week in March 1961.

By the time the tempest-in-a-shoebox had run its course, Portage County commissioners, proud guardians of a brand-new courthouse with seemingly vulnerable vinyl flooring, had been dragged into the debate.

They opted, diplomatically, to sidestep the matter.

Graven’s opening salvo in the footwear flap included an assertion that spike heels “dreamed up by French designers” were “cutting deeply into hardwood flooring and destroying vinyl, rubber and asphalt tile floors.”

The stiletto styles were nothing less than “a new plague,” he said, “which, if allowed to continue unchecked, will cause more ultimate damage (to flooring) than marching ants, termites, dry rot, rust and faulty plumbing combined.”

Hardwood floors, the city building inspector said, were especially vulnerable because they could withstand spike heels “only a few weeks.”

He offered a word of advice for the opposite sex: “Men, get down on your knees and take a good look at the floors of your new home. The small horseshoe imprints are the stamp of the American female.”

And, if the damage caused to “the very foundation of the American home” by the equine-like footsteps wasn’t bad enough, Graven raised an even more fearful specter. Not only were spike heels causing physical ruin, there was a psychic toll as well: They had “reduced the height of the American male by four to six inches.”

Graven’s words of warning concluded with a final paragraph that noted that the sharp heels were “ruining” the flooring of the new Portage County Courthouse, which had opened three months earlier. Among its employees were women who presumably were guilty of being fashion forward in their choice of footwear.

A follow-up story reported that Graven had received phone calls and letters of support from many women — even though he said he had expected an opposite reaction — who said they didn’t like spike-heeled shoes but wore them “because they are stylish.”

The article reiterated that floors at the new courthouse were “deeply pitted” because of spike heels.

R-C reporter Carol Clapp fired a return volley a few days later, in a front-page article, headlined, “This suit you, Mr. Graven?”

The article was accompanied by a photograph of “substitute footwear” chosen by six “attractive young women employed in the courthouse.” Only one “diehard” opted for spike heels; the rest were shod in a motley assortment that included leather snow boots, felt bedroom slippers, high-topped sneakers, and “a simple little sock” ensemble.

As the women were modeling their choices, Clapp reported, “Not a single whistle of approval or even a smile crossed the faces of ‘practical’ males in the vicinity — or females, either.”

While it was obvious that the alternative choices posed no threat to flooring of any kind, the women “found the new styles absolutely hysterical,” she said.

Clapp concluded her report with a few words for Graven: “Come on now, sir, don’t you really think even spike heels are better than ragged tennis shoes?”

The final word on footwear came from two Portage County commissioners, who decided not to take a stand on the question of spikes vs. sensible shoes.

“Portage County commissioners want no part of setting up rules and regulations for women’s footwear,” the R-C reported.

Commissioners James Kline and Claude Watters believed that they “didn’t have the right to dictate what the ladies employed at the courthouse wear as foot coverings.” And, contrary to the assertions of Graven, they said there was no evidence that the courthouse floors were being destroyed by what women there were wearing on their feet.

Kline declined to step into the controversy.

Watters said he didn’t like spike heels on women. But then, he didn’t like the way men’s shoes were beginning to look, either. “I’ll stock up on the old kind ahead of time before I’ll have my toes cramped,” he said.

He added that he believed in “comfortable clothes” and didn’t want “someone else telling him what’s fashionable.”

With neither commissioner willing to put his foot down one way or the other, talk of a ban on towering heels ended. And, as far as Portage County was concerned in 1961, the “time-honored custom” of parking shoes at the door remained in Japan.

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