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My great-grandfather John Jerz lived in the back room of this tiny neighborhood shoe shop, in a Polish neighborhood in Chicago's West Side.

My grandfather Joseph J. Jerz was a die-cutter in the auto industry. My father George J. Jerz was born in 1933. He guesses that this photo dates from 1920.

On the walls of the Jerz shoe store are mostly posters for "O'Sullivan Heels," and "Tite-Edge Rubber Heels." In those days, a shoe was so well-made that when the heels wore out, you would take it to a neighborhood shoe shop such as this one, in order to get a new heel nailed onto the leather sole.

I visited this house with my father in 1991. The Polish families had long since moved out, and the neighborhood was mostly Hispanic. The small shop window was still there, but the store had been converted into a living room.

The boy in the photo is Walter Jerz, who my father says was the fifth-ranked middle-weight boxer in the 1930s (and had the same boxing manager as Joe Louis).  Walter was one of my grandfather's six siblings: after Joseph there were Clara, Walter, Elizabeth, Florence, Raymond, and Ted. 

Ted, the youngest, died in the summer of 1999.  He was not much older than my father, and the two had recently reconnected.  My father found this photo while going through his Uncle Ted's personal effects.

• Bata Shoe Museum (in Toronto, a few blocks from where I used to live)
• History of shoes, a nonacademic resource from About.com.
• United Shoe antitrust suit (1918) against the United Shoe Machinery Corporation, accused of monopolizing the manufacture and sale of shoemaking machines. (The court found the company not guilty. Go figure.)
• The Microsoft Antitrust Trial has referred to the above antitrust case.
• Official Website of Poland