Chuck Taylor, All Star: The True Story of the Man behind the Most Famous Athletic Shoe in History

Introduction

1 Introduction It’s a Wednesday night, March 19, 1919, in Columbus, Indiana, a prosperous manufacturing and agricultural center of about 9,000 souls forty-ve miles southeast of Indianapolis. The recent hard winter has not quite broken. Inside a two-story, red brick government building, in the high-ceilinged second-oor auditorium, scores of basketball fans have gathered to see a doubleheader: The Indianapolis Em-Roes Juniors are playing the Concordia Club in a warm-up match, and the Columbus Commercials, the local semi-pro team, are about to knock off a nearby military squad, the Camp Grant Five, by a score of 45-30. “Swamped” the soldiers, a newspaper reporter was to write the next day.1 It was just another basketball exhibition in just another small Indiana town, hardly a major sporting event in 1919, yet the local press was there. Why? 00ChuckIntro.indd 11/18/05, 2:59 PM 1 2 It could be they came to watch local wunderkind Charlie Taylor, a seventeen-year-old high school senior and captain of the Columbus High School Bull Dogs, which had just returned from the State High School Athletic Association single-class boys basketball tournament in West Lafayette the previous weekend. Though Taylor and his comrades were eliminated in the quarternal round, the city had feted the team Tuesday evening in that very auditorium, followed by a candlelight procession through downtown streets that attracted hundreds. The Camp Grant Five game was Charlie Taylor’s inauguration in professional sports. He did not score, and he only played the last three minutes in what was essentially a walkover. It should have been a forgotten, inconsequential exhibition game, a blip in time in the history of sports, except that the (Columbus, Ind.) Evening Republican had chosen to cover the event and report on the young basketball pilgrim’s progress. Taylor’s presence on this court while still in high school signaled his promise and his ambition, and the media’s attention foreshadowed a mutual love affair that was to last nearly fty years, though Taylor’s prominence faded into obscurity even before his death in 1969. Chuck Taylor, as the world would come to know young Charlie, was at the forefront of popularizing the game of basketball to the masses. Beginning in 1932, more than 750 million pairs of gym shoes known as the Converse Chuck Taylor All Star would be sold, making Taylor’s signature arguably the single most successful endorsement of sports equipment anywhere in the world, ever. Similar shoes from U.S. Rubber (“Keds”), B. F. Goodrich (“P. F. Flyers”), and others also sold millions, and in the 1950s kids aligned with their favorite brands much as their parents chose Ford over Chevy. Air Jordans may be more famous today, but “Chucks” remain virtually unchanged after decades: rubber-soled, double-wall 00ChuckIntro.indd 11/18/05, 2:59 PM 2 3 Introduction canvas body, and the circular ankle patch with a bright blue star in the middle and Chuck Taylor’s signature across it. The shoe, and the ankle patch, are pop art today. They are cultural icons, whether for grunge youth and alternative lifestyles or for country boys who remember skipping over gravel roads in them in their youth. The shoes especially are associated with the formative years of basketball in this country. They were standard fare for high school, college, and professional basketball players well into the 1960s, when their popularity gave way to leather shoes from Adidas, Puma, Reebok, and, in an ironic twist, Nike. One says “ironic” because Nike, the international shoe behemoth that gained steam with its running shoe in the late 1970s, nally purchased Converse, Inc., in 2003, exactly ninety-ve years after Marquis Converse founded the Converse Rubber Shoe Company in Malden, Massachusetts. Yet Chuck Taylor remains the most famous name in sports that no one knows anything about. Sports journalist Frank DeFord, in both a National Public Radio commentary and a written essay in 2003, remarked how he didn’t even know there was a real Chuck Taylor until former basketball player and former Converse employee Rod “Hot Rod” Hundley offered to introduce him to Taylor in the mid-1960s. DeFord thought the name“Chuck Taylor”was a marketing tool, much like“Betty Crocker”is for foods. Other sports journalists also have marveled in print how little is known about Chuck. Bob Sherrill, a columnist for...