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It's obvious that Randy Bailey cares about his customers. When they bring him their shoes, purses, belts or baseball gloves that are worn, faded, broken or chewed by a dog, he listens carefully to what they need and quickly gets to work on the repair, usually finishing the job in a day or two.
Bailey, 56, is the owner of Harold's Shoe Repair, which occupies an old, small building on South Main Street, just south of the railroad tracks in Elkhart. There's little retail display space in the shop, which is redolent of rubber cement, but what little exists is filled by polish, laces, shoehorns and leather treatments. Shelves of repaired and resoled shoes behind the counter await their owners as Bailey and two part-time employees busily work on more-recent arrivals.
"We're up about 15 percent this year," Bailey says. "People have less money; they're getting things fixed and they're learning why their grandparents never threw anything away. Because they went through the Great Depression and they didn't have it."
Bailey, who bought the business in 2006, occupies another niche in the community, serving more than 400 customers with special orthopedic needs.
"They bring in a prescription and we fill it," says Bailey. "We do what we call flares, which makes the shoe wider for more stability. We do wedges, which changes the angle of the foot to relieve pain in some people. We can do build-ups, which is for leg length discrepancy… When your feet hurt it makes it hard to do a lot of things."
Bailey knows first-hand about different kinds of pain.
In November 1993, he says he tried to commit suicide by jumping off of a 35-foot-high tower at a nearby park.
"I was working, I had been for five years, as an assistant manager at a convenience store and it just started getting too stressful for me and I'm not a person that -- at that time at least -- … reached out to other people. It was just too big for me to handle and I jumped off the observation tower at Oxbow Park. I was paranoid for a few years before that, and depression and paranoia kind of feed off each other. And when you think there's a way that you can stop the hurting it seems more and more attractive."
The plunge left Bailey with crushed heels, a broken leg, a hole in his right ankle and compression fractures in two vertebrae. He underwent two surgeries during two months of hospitalization and a third two months later.
Sixteen years later, the bones in his right foot are fused and misshapen. With his heel on the floor, he can only lift his toes a quarter inch. He usually works in his socks, even though the floor is pretty dirty and has shoe tacks on it. "It's more comfortable" he says.
A pair of orthopedic shoes costs him about $1,000, so between fixing his customers' shoes, Bailey is working to make a pair for himself.
The experience has changed Bailey's outlook. "Before I felt like I always had to keep my feelings inside, not talk with other people, not reach out to them," he said. "I was very shy. I found that it helps a lot to talk to other people. Just the fact that I can come to work and have a place to go to keep myself occupied, that can do a lot to help keep depression away."
Bailey recently bought a brick building two blocks down the street that, at more than 7,000 square feet, is four times the size of his current shop. He's planning on moving on July 1 and says he won't miss a day of being open for his customers.
"I try to do the best I can to help people with their foot problems," Bailey says. "That's the kind of thing that really makes somebody feel good …when people say, 'You really helped me.' That's really what I'm in it for."
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