Philflex Sporties

It seems like it is so much harder to find vintage sport shoes in good condition than  it is to find lovely evening pumps or even nice dressy shoes.  Of course, it is easy to see why.  Most people wear their casual shoes much more often than they do evening shoes.   And even after casual shoes become very worn, they then become the yard work shoes or the gardening shoes.

When I ran across some late 1930s and 1940s shoes unworn and in the original boxes, I looked through them, expecting to find brown pumps in each box, and for the most part, I was right.  But then I found this pair of sporty two tone moccasins, a total surprise.

If you’ve ever had the privilege of talking about the war years with anyone who lived through and remembers the early 1940s, you would think that by the end of the war there were no leather shoes to be had at all.  But here I found about a dozen pairs, all unworn, and probably dead-stock from a store. Maybe all the women in town ran out of coupons, or  perhaps they were  odd sizes no one could wear.   Whatever the reason, I was happy to get this pair of survivors.

One might not expect to find sport shoes in a box labeled “Glamour Girl.”

But a look at the side told a more accurate story about the contents of the box.