THE LAST COBBLER
One of the last practitioners of a fading trade, Woonsocket shoe repairman Norman Decelles is closing down shop after 65 years
WOONSOCKET – In the corner of his small shop on Elm Street, Norman L. Decelles, a shoe repairman by trade, uses an oiled rag to polish a 1955 Landis shoe finishing machine – a long cast iron contraption used for trimming leather and grinding, buffing, brushing and finishing edges of the soles.
Nearby is a sewing machine that Decelles used to operate manually with a foot pedal to repair stitching along shoes and other leather products.
On Thursday, the antique shoe repair machines at Pierannunzi Shoe Rebuilding were quiet, destined to be sold as collector’s items or parts on eBay.
Decelles has been busy all morning clearing shelves, taking down photographs and packing away a century’s worth of memories on the last day of business for Woonsocket’s only surviving shoe repair shop.
Decelles, the city’s last cobbler, is calling it quits after 65 years, the past 25 of those as proprietor of Pierannunzi Shoe Rebuilding, which in its heyday was one of the most wellknown shoemakers in Rhode Island.
The business was started in a small shop at Court Square by Camillo A. Pierannunzi in 1902, an Italian cobbler who passed the family business on to his son, Camillo Pierannunzi Jr. in 1947.
Decelles bought the business from Pierannunzi in 1993, and re-located the business in 2009 to a storefront at 534 Elm St., which once housed the old Phil’s Shoe Store.
“I feel bad that I’m stopping,” Decelles, 78, says with tears in his eyes. “But my wife and I have been talking about it for a couple of years and my doctor says my health should come first.”
Decelles is a realist, too. He knows as well as anybody that shoe repair is a dying trade and that the ranks of oldschool shoe repairmen like him are shrinking.
There are fewer than 7,000 shoerepair shops in the country, according to the Shoe Service Institute of America. That’s a dramatic decline from the 15,000 repair shops in 1997 and just a fraction of the nearly 60,000 stores that were sprinkled throughout the United States in the 1940s.
The decline has been slow and steady, dating back to the 1970s when the majority of shoe purchases in the U.S. shifted to cheap Asian imports built on cheap and the declining cost of raw materials. Additionally the fashion industry of today encourages consumers to buy new rather than save as worn out shoes are not perceived to be worth repairing when it’s cheaper to buy a fresh pair.
“Shoes are so cheap today you can go buy a new pair for less than what it costs to have them fixed,” he says. “In the old days, shoes were made with quality leather. Nowadays, ninety-nine percent of all shoes are mass-produced with cheap, man-made materials.”
People still buy high-end leather footwear - like the $600 cowboy boots Decelles repaired last month – but those bread-and-butter customers are far and few between these days.
Decelles grew up on Washington Street, a child of mill workers Carmel and Alice Decelles. He received his primary education from the Brothers of the Sacred Heart, but left school to set out on his own.
“I went to the school of hard knocks,” he says. “I used my back instead of my head.”
Decelles learned the craft of shoe repair as a kid working part-time for several Woonsocket shoe repair shops on Bernon Street starting at the age of 13, then worked for 35 years for the Pierannunzi family.
“As a kid I remembering going into shoe shops with my father and seeing all the machines. It’s something I always wanted to do,” he says.
Decelles, who lives in Burrillville, later went to work at Dennison Manufacturing in Framingham where he worked for 32 years to support his wife of 60 years, Lorraine, and their four children, Denise, Susan, Joanne and Norman, a doctor at Zamabarano State Hospital in Burrilliville.
He left Dennison in 1992 to buy Pierannunzi Shoe Rebuilding and return to the business he loved. A big part of that business, he says, was repairing shoes so they could be adapted to fit unique feet.
“I used to do a lot of orthopedic work,” says Decelles, who was also the go-to-man for thousands of height-challenged men looking for a “lift.”
Twenty-five-years later, Decelles says its time to hang up his leather pliers and hammers and retire so he can spend more time gardening and with his family, which includes nine grandchildren and four great grandchildren.
“It’s been a good run, but the business isn’t what it used to be,” he says. “Times change and you have to accept it.”