[title subtitle=”words: Heather Steadham
Images: courtesy Laura Carlton”][/title]
It was a hot Arkansas Saturday, the first time I saw Russell Steed. I was ambling along President Clinton Avenue, fresh from a morning of buying homemade soap and organic hummus at the Little Rock Farmer’s Market. Russell was outside Barakat Bespoke (the boutique that labels itself “the ultimate gentleman’s haberdashery”), sweating over a brilliantly shining pair of shoes, persisting in his buffing until he could just about see his reflection in the mirror-like sheen.
“I’m gonna put everything I have into it,” Russell, who’s turning fifty this month, says. “My first pair of shoes are gonna look as good as my last pair of shoes. Everything in between is gonna look the same. Because I’m really hard on myself. If it doesn’t look good, I’m gonna start all over. I’m not letting you out of my chair until I’m satisfied with how it looks. That’s just how I am. You know, an average shine lasts ten minutes. But if I’m not happy, it could last up to fifteen.”
This desire for excellence began early for Russell. “I’ve been shining shoes my whole life,” he tells me. While growing up in Houston, Texas, with his mother, Russell spent summers with his grandfather, a World War II veteran, in Mena, Arkansas. “His shoes were always immaculate,” Russell remembers. “And on Saturday evening he’d jerk them all out and throw them down on the floor, and we’d sit there and shine shoes to get them ready for Sunday.”
But it wasn’t the shoeshine business that Russell first pursued when it was time for him to get a job. In 1984, he joined the Navy, actually graduating from high school while he was in boot camp out in San Diego, California. “I don’t think you can do that anymore, but since they knew I was going into the military they let me go early,” he explains. But even then, his shoeshine destiny gleamed through: “The Navy gave us two pairs of boots. On the first day of boot camp, I got a pair looking like mirrors. I just kept them that way. ‘Cause once you do it, maintenance is easy. And so, when people started flunking inspections, they’d come to me wanting to know how I did it, and I never gave away my secrets. In fact, I got paid for doing it for other people! So I guess that was my first professional shoe shining career.”
A year-and-a-half later, after traveling with the Navy to exotic locations like China and Australia, Russell was given a medical discharge. He settled in Savannah, Georgia, and began working for an old Arkansas friend—Walmart—and, luckily for him, met Tane, the love of his life.
“We had our first date on September the tenth; on October the tenth I asked her to marry me, and we were married on November the tenth. I knew. And it’s been—fixing to be sixteen years.”
It wasn’t until their first son came along that a return to Arkansas even crossed their minds. Born with a low birth weight and multiple congenital issues, their son had special needs that required specialized care. Russell and Tane were in a quandary: “In Savannah, the doctors were going, ‘We don’t know what to do.’” Fortunately, Walmart was able to transfer Russell to Benton in 2000, which is near the world-renowned Arkansas Children’s Hospital. “Fifteen years and fourteen surgeries later,” Russell smiles, “he’s doing great.”
Working for various retailers kept the family afloat until 2013 when Russell was laid off. But that was just the chance needed for serendipity to pop up. “My wife and I were getting ready to go to a Valentine’s thing and my wife said, ‘Shine my shoes up for me.’ So I shined her shoes up for her, and she said, ‘Why don’t you do this?’ And I was like, ‘I do do this.’ And she said, ‘No no no. For a living.’ And I was like, ‘Well, there’s not any shoe shiners.’ And she said, ‘Well, that’s the point.’”
So Russell began researching the market, and he says he came across a magazine article that declared the shoeshine business was the fastest growing entrepreneurship in the United States. “So that’s where I started. I just got all my stuff together, got a stand built and went to Rhea’s Menswear in Benton.”
Since his time at Rhea’s Menswear, shoeshine aficionados have found him at places like the Art of Men’s Cuts in Bryant, the Electric Cowboy in Little Rock, and Galaxy Furniture in the Argenta District of North Little Rock. He’s even built a portable shoeshine stand, which he’s carted to conventions like the Arkansas Cattlemen’s Association in Fort Smith.
“Everywhere I’ve been I’ve gotten better at my craft,” Russell says of the many places he’s worked. “You know, I don’t call myself a shoeshine ‘man.’ I’m a shoeshine ‘artisan.’ Because it is an art. And every shine that I do I get better! I love it. My mission statement when I started this was, ‘I want to have a positive impact on every person that sits in my stand.’ And I believe I do. You know, people can tell where you stand by looking at your feet. So if you take care of your shoes, people notice that. And there’s another article that says that women—that’s one of the first things they look at in a guy, their shoes. So there you go. Gents, get your shoes shined.”
And some pretty famous gents have indeed had their shoes shined by Russell. “I don’t really look at people. I look at their shoes. So I’m shining this pair of shoes and I look up, and there’s Judge Reinhold [of Beverly Hills Cop and Gremlins fame] in my chair. And so I just went on and we sat and chit-chatted and I could tell at any minute he knew I was gonna ask for an autograph, but I didn’t. He actually lives in the Heights. The other famous person that I’ve shined his shoes is Bubba [Alan Autry] from In the Heat of the Night. I did his shoes over in Benton.”
Are those the only famous folks Russell has seen?
“The one that I didn’t get to take a picture of is . . . Governor Asa Hutchinson came and sat in my chair, and I couldn’t take his picture. They said it wasn’t an official photo op. But anyway, I got the governor in my chair.”
Russell enjoys the traveling shoeshine lifestyle well enough, but he’s got a bigger plan in mind. “My ultimate goal is to have places that I can put a stand, go to the VA [Veterans Administration], and say, ‘I need a vet that has PTSD [Post Traumatic Stress Disorder].’ Because I have it and we don’t handle stress. We just don’t. And so I can go to the VA and say, ‘I need a vet—male or female, I don’t care.’ And I can say ‘Okay, here’s you a stand, you go.’”
After training these vets for six months at no charge, Russell then plans for the vet to either buy or lease the stand from him so that they can stay in the same spot with which they’ve become familiar and where they’ve developed a clientele. He’d also like to own and operate a fleet of mobile shoeshine stands. He can see it now: “People would just file out of their office buildings into the chair and go back to work. But I want it to be run by vets because I am one.”
He even has a name for his fledgling business: The Shining. He got it from the Stephen King book (“not the movie,” he insists), and smiles while he tells me, “I’m just kind of macabre.”
It’s not the macabre I see when I look into his eyes, framed by wire-rimmed-glasses and his jovial face; it’s joy. “I’m thankful that I live in a country where I can go, and I can work for myself. I can do my thing, and if it doesn’t work, I can move on to something else. But I’m not exactly ready to give up on this yet. My day’s gonna come and I’m gonna be able to do what I wanna do. I’ve always felt that if the good Lord wasn’t too good to wash the feet of his disciples, then I’m not too good to shine a few shoes.”
You can contact Russell at theshiningshoeshine@gmail.com.
You can also follow him on Instagram at TheShiningShoeShine.
