PENNY LOAFERS, A HISTORY (THX NANCY)

My friend, Nancy, whose blog is: http://nancysbeeess.blogspot.com/
recently wrote a post about penny loafers. It set me to thinking about how I never owned a pair of penny loafers and how I always intrigued by the idea of putting a penny in one's shoes. I wondered where it originated. So I did a little researching, which today is a click away.

The loafer is most associated with the G.H. Bass shoe company, which called it the Weejun. It was based on the style of slip-on shoes worn by Norwegian farmers (hence the name, Weejun). It was casual and elegant and could be worn with a suit or with shorts. Wow. Good luck with any other shoe doing that.

Back in the 40s and 50s, people took to putting dimes in their shoes. It was the price of a phone call on the payphones back then. That I DO remember. Pay phones remained a dime per call up until 1976, in C-bus anyway. I remember the day they changed the phones because I was sitting in Mt. Carmel Hospital getting a prenatal check up (I was pregnant with my first born child, Jette) and we watched the men from the phone company going from floor to floor raising the calls to a quarter.

Later, people changed it to a penny, and the shinier, the better.

Thus ends this rattling tale of shoe history...

Inquiring minds probably didn't want to know, but now it's just one more piece of useless information, along with truffles, that you can store in your head and bring out at a dinner party.

You're welcome. *deep bow*


References

http://www.ehow.com/about_5056990_history-penny-loafers.html

http://blogs.zappos.com/blogs/comfort/2008/07/01/history-of-a-shoe-penny-loafers