My family owned a boot shop for many decades. My Granddaddy was also a saddle maker. When I was in elementary school, my Granddaddy got cancer and eventually died. My daddy took over the business.
At the age of 11, my first job was cleaning and prepping boots for repair. For boots with mud and other stuff caked on them, there was a minimum shop charge of $5 and a max charge of $20. The person cleaning the boots was paid the shop charge directly in cash. It was all determined when the boots were brought in. Most of the boots charged the minimum where easy to clean; sometimes they just needed to be banged against something to get the gunk off. The owners just didn’t want to do it themselves for whatever reason. For an elementary kid in the 1970s, that was a fairly lucrative gig. Today’s drawing is inspired by those boots.
