Eleanor Jacobs, a force behind the Earth Shoe phenomenon, dies at 91

Eleanor Jacobs, who stumbled upon a pair of odd-looking shoes in Denmark and, with her husband, Raymond, created a shortlived phenomenon by selling them in the United States as Earth Shoes, died Aug. 25 at her home in Litchfield, Connecticut. She was 91.

Her daughter Susan Jacobs said the cause was congestive heart failure.

In 1969, while she and her husband were vacationing in Denmark, Jacobs’ chronic back pain increased from all the walking she had been doing. She found unexpected salvation with a pair of negative-heel shoes she found at a store in Copenhagen.

Originally called Anne Kalso Minus-heels, named after the Danish yoga instructor who had designed them, they featured a wide toe box and a sole that was thicker in the front than in the back.

As the family continued to Norway, Jacobs was so pleased with her new purchase that Raymond Jacobs, who was a commercial photographer at the time, suggested they try to sell the shoes in the United States.

When they called Kalso, she was happy that the Jacobses were not in the shoe business — she had rejected earlier offers from conventional shoe manufacturers — and that Raymond Jacobs wanted to market the shoes as part of a back-to-nature movement.

On April 22 the next year, the couple opened a store devoted to their homely import in their street-level brownstone near Union Square in Manhattan. Later that morning, they noticed a stream of young people, many of them hippies, passing their store toward Union Square Park, and Jacobs asked one of them what was going on.

“Hey, man, it’s Earth Day! There is a love-in-down the street in the park,” she recalled a young man telling her when she wrote about that day for the Litchfield Enquirer in 2008. “Come and join us.”

The Jacobses did not join them. Instead, they renamed the shoes.

“I turned to look at my husband, who had a eureka look on his formerly worried face,” Jacobs wrote. “‘Ellie, that’s it,’ he screamed at me. ‘We’ll call them Earth Shoes.’”

He scribbled the name in black crayon on a piece of cardboard and placed it in the store window. Customers quickly began buying the shoes.

It was the start of an exciting but brief business odyssey for the couple, who were not footwear experts and had never run a business. After making a deal with Kalso for North American distribution rights (which would expand to world rights, except in Denmark), they licensed and supplied more than 100 stores. Demand grew so quickly that the Jacobses opened a factory in 1973 in Middleboro, Massachusetts, to augment their Danish imports. In all, they would sell millions of pairs of Earth Shoes.

Despite its peculiar look, the Earth Shoe became popular beyond the counterculture set, largely because of the help it was said to offer to aching backs and feet (a point of disagreement among podiatrists and other foot experts). The shoes were featured in The Whole Earth Catalog and on Time magazine billboards in Grand Central Terminal.

“The ugly duckling shoe seems to have caught on like ‘The Exorcist,’” The Times reported in 1974. “And indeed, the line at the cash counter on Monday would have been envied by many theater managers. Army parkas and bluejeans cued up with mink and Brooks Brothers tweeds to pay for their shoes and walked out happily with purchases in burlap bags.”

The Times also reported that a chauffeur pulled up at the Jacobses’ store on East 17th Street one day, carrying a penciled outline of actor Walter Matthau’s feet. He was shooting a film in Manhattan, and his feet were hurting. Six pairs were sent back to him. He bought two.

Around that time, the Jacobses added new styles, including an athletic shoe and a hiking boot, to their staples of walking shoe and sandals. Jacobs said they needed to appeal to a widening customer base.

“The people who are buying our shoes are no longer leftover flower children from the ’60s,” she told The Washington Post in 1975. “They’re worn by a cross section of American people now. So we had to develop a new line of shoe with that in mind.”

In addition to her daughter Susan, Jacobs is survived by another daughter, Laura Pavlick, and two grandchildren. Her husband died in 1993.