Selvaine
91 Years Of The American Boat Shoe
I've spent the last six months reading every email from the guys who used to buy these shoes before 2012. They sent me dates. Specific ones. The year they bought their first pair. The year the local cobbler retired. The year the store on Main Street closed. The year the pair they bought stopped breaking in like the old ones.
I started writing the dates down. Six months later I had a timeline. This is it.
Some years are mine. Most aren't. Names are real, used with permission.
— Tom Reilly, Selvaine
The shoe is invented for one reason. Grip on a wet deck.
Paul Sperry patents the siped sole.
Watches his cocker spaniel grip ice on a New England pond. Cuts the same razor pattern into a rubber sole. Files the patent. Names the shoe Top-Sider because it's built for the top side of a sailboat.
The shoe spreads through the American sailing class.
Picked up by yacht clubs. Sold at marina stores. Resoled at the original Sperry Connecticut shop. Built in Massachusetts and Connecticut, never Maine.
Craig Paton's father hands him his first pair.
High school. Leather moccasins. Craig wore them through to 1976, resoled three times at the Sperry Connecticut shop.
Michael Grimes buys his first pair at Abercrombie & Fitch in Chicago.
Twenty dollars. Three voices in my inbox remember paying about that much for a first pair in the 60s. Bill May, 80 years old, says it best.
The cohort buys the shoe like the cohort buys flour. By the year.
Bernard Barry buys the first of what will become seven pairs in a row.
Continuous ownership of one pair of Sperry Top-Siders from 1978 forward. Replaces the pair when it dies. Same brand, same shoe, every time.
Carl Peterson buys a pair every year at Spags hardware store in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts.
Under twenty dollars. Same shelf as the boom vangs, hawsers, telltales, and winch handles. No bags. Brian Simard wrote me the cohort phrase from the era.
Rob Krott buys a pair of Timberland boat shoes.
They last him fifteen years. The pair he buys to replace them, decades later, falls apart in two weeks. The collapse Rob lived through is the collapse this entire page is about.
Adam Zucker buys his first pair of Top-Siders at twenty-two.
Wears them through the whole summer without socks the way every kid in his neighborhood did. Still wearing boat shoes 43 years later. His feet have changed. The shoe is the only thing connecting the twenty-two-year-old version of him to the sixty-five-year-old version.
I buy my first pair at the Sperry store on Main Street in Annapolis.
Cognac. A buddy in Eastport told me not to wear socks. Not to baby them. Get them wet. Let the salt do its work. I did. That pair made it to 1996.
The wise guys of Wall Street walk through Reagan's door.
Bass Weejun is sold off. Production moves to China.
Jeffrey Leonard, a former shoe fitter at marina retail stores for 30 years, put it in one sentence. Six likes on the comment.
The Sperry Connecticut resoling program ends.
The cobbler in New Haven who resoled my 1987 pair retires the same year. Tells me his last few years of work were mostly Sperrys handed down from fathers to sons.
My 1987 pair finally dies. I buy another from the same store. Same color. Same shape.
That pair lasts six years. The next one four. Then two. Then one. The shoe on the box is the same. The shoe inside is not.
The 1935 silhouette, rebuilt at the price it used to cost.
Five brands. Two years. One script.
Sperry production moves overseas.
Reebok had bought the brand earlier. Wolverine takes it over. The Aldo Group in Canada eventually inherits it. Three holding companies in fifteen years. The pair I buy that fall doesn't break in like the old ones. The leather isn't real leather. It's a finish painted on top of something that can't breathe.
Cole Haan, L.L. Bean's Casco Bay line, and Sebago each get sold, gutted, moved.
Chris Hamman watches his Cole Haans rot from a painted-on finish that won't let the leather breathe. Jeff Raymond, who cut leather at the L.L. Bean Freeport shop "many decades ago, the previous century in fact," catches the giveaway tell on Bean's product page.
Sperry sizing quietly changes.
Tim Voss, Alexander Mausheim, Al Ewert, Dave Sutton — four guys, four separate emails, same complaint. The new pair runs half a size smaller than the old one. Same number on the box. Different shoe inside.
William Plyler's post-2012 Gold Cup separates inside a week.
The Gold Cup is the $185 premium tier. Higher-grade leather. Better construction. The shoe a guy buys when he's decided to do it right. Plyler watches his separate. Patrick Harkins calls his own Gold Cup "lipstick on a pig." Robert Cembalest reports the sides blowing out at the ball of his foot.
The cohort goes underground.
The cohort starts stockpiling.
Bill Donahue tracks Sebago's two-step migration — first China, then Central America — and snags a dozen pairs of New Old Stock from European online sellers. Chris Hamman buys twelve pairs of vintage Allen Edmonds off eBay at fifty dollars each and pays a local cobbler a hundred to rebuild the soles. Plans to wear them the rest of his life.
Steve LaPaglia, Jim Childs, and two other guys hold their pre-2012 Top-Siders together with duct tape.
Not vanity. The post-2012 replacement falls apart in 14 months. The duct tape on the original is the more honest option.
The Sperry Top-Sider store in Annapolis closes.
The sailing capital of the U.S. Thomas Christopher wrote me from a yacht club not five miles from the empty storefront.
Fawcett's chandlery in Annapolis closes. The Boatique on the Ortega River closes. Graham's Boat Yard down the road from it closes.
The same script runs in every port town the shoe was named for. They keep the rope-knot logo. They keep the catalog photos of guys on sailboats. They close the actual stores.
I try Quoddy. Then Rancourt. Then L.L. Bean's Casco Bay.
Quoddy is $320 and they're the real thing, but at that price I have to think of it as an heirloom and I just wanted boat shoes. Rancourt — same problem. Bean Casco Bay — read the product page carefully. The factory "we've used for decades" used to be in Brunswick.
One guy. One supplier. One shoe.
I find a supplier willing to build the spec the way it used to be built.
Same factory tier as the current Sperry mainline. Different spec. Different price. Stitched moc-toe construction, classic deck-lace tie, siped non-slip sole on the original 1935 pattern. Leather-finish upper. Honest about what it is. The retail markup, the wholesale margin, the magazine ad budget — all cut out of the math.
I launch the Marlin at $45 a pair.
First six months: thousands of orders. Hundreds of emails. The dates above came from those emails. The Annapolis store. The Spags hardware store. The cobbler in Grosse Pointe. The Boatique. The widths discontinued in 2014. The Gold Cup that separated in a week. Every date in this timeline is a date a guy in my inbox remembered without me asking.
The pair I'm wearing as I write this has been on my feet for 14 months.
Brown. Built on the spec. Been to St. Michaels twice. Been on a charter out of the Sassafras River. Been to a funeral I didn't expect to wear them to. The leather has darkened at the flex point the way the 1987 pair did. The sole is unmarked. The laces have softened into the eyelets.
They feel like the 1987 pair felt in 1989. When I'd had them long enough to forget I was wearing them.
The dates aren't going to change. The shoe doesn't have to.
The Annapolis store isn't coming back. Spags isn't coming back. The cobbler in New Haven isn't coming back. The Boatique on the Ortega River isn't coming back. Sperry isn't going to remember what it was.
The shoe can.
If you want to look, the link's below.
— Tom Reilly, Selvaine
$45. Four colors. 30 days.
Blue, brown, black, white.
$45 a pair. $80 for two. $110 for three.
Wear them on the dock. Wear them to the cookout. Wear them to your grandson's high school graduation. If they aren't the boat shoes you remember from before 2012, send them back. 30 days, no store credit, no runaround.
See The Marlin →