‘Shoe Guy’ carries on family tradition in Dahlonega

What do a meteorite, an arrowhead-impaled buffalo vertebrae and a letter from the office of Jimmy Carter have in common? Absolutely nothing. Except for Jim Foley: The Shoe Guy.
The longtime local leather crafter is a collector of unusual and occasionally extraterrestrial artifacts.
And really there’s no telling what out-of-this-world items you’ll find scattered amidst the shoe polish and leather goods in his quiet workshop at 84 Esborn Road.
“A friend of mine was fishing in Montana,” said Foley while studying the buffalo vertebrae which is pierced with a perfectly preserved arrow head. “He found it after a flood.”
The meteorite, which sits on a shelf, was found on the banks of the Chestatee River. It hasn’t been officially deemed a space rock since Foley didn’t want scientists to slice it up in order to determine its ultimate origins. But it does have the look and weight of something otherworldly. And Jimmy Carter’s letter is a thank you note of sorts.
Recently The Nugget sat down with Foley to talk about these oddities and his 72 years in business as a leather crafter.
It’s a business that he was born into.  
“I started this when I was nine years old,” he said. “My mom divorced and I got sent to live with my father in Texas. His father was a saddle maker.”
Leather work ran in the family on all sides.
“My mom’s father was an Italian shoemaker,” Foley said “… There I learned shoe repair.”
A young Foley instantly took to the line of work. Though he still had to labor several years before he had earned his true title of Shoe Guy.
“My grandfather said we can’t call you a Shoe Guy until you get paid and you ain’t ready to get paid yet,” recalled Foley. “But when I was 14 I got paid .75 cents for my work. And gramps says ‘Now we call you a Shoe Guy.’”
It’s a name that stuck. And it’s been displayed prominently on his business card for decades. But it hasn’t been all shoe soles and leather laces for Foley. At 80 years of age, he’s been a man of many careers.

BARRACKS TO BEAUTY SCHOOL

Foley, a Boston native, first arrived in Dahlonega in 1959. As a soldier training at Camp Frank Merrill he was anything but a tourist, but he still fell in love with the town while marching on the then dirt road of Camp Wahsega and sleeping in the Chattahoochee National Forest.
“We lived in tents out in the field,” said Foley. “The camp was three little green tar paper shacks then.”
From there he served in Korea and then outside Vietnam.
In the early 1970s he worked as a firefighter in Connecticut. But that career came to a sudden halt in ’73 when he crashed through the floor of a burning building and broke his neck.
“Four of us went down, 12 feet into the basement,” he said. “I spent two to three months in the hospital and then they finally pensioned me off.”
On the job hunt, with a newly fused vertebrae, Foley headed in an unlikely direction:
Beauty school.
“I became a beautician,” he said. “I was a licensed beautician.”
That career didn’t last, for reasons that were only slightly less dangerous than his firefighting job.
“It’s something I thought I wanted to try,” he said with a shrug. “But being around all those women, all I did was end up getting in a lot of trouble.”
Throughout his life he always came back to leather crafting. And in 1987 he came back to Dahlonega too, as he set up shop and got to work.
Though, for Foley, it’s always been more than work.
For him, and his wife Cindy, it’s art. Together they collaborate on custom creations, as Jim engraves the leather and Cindy meticulously paints their works. One such creation was a portrait of Jimmy Carter, which currently hangs in the Carter Library. And it earned them a note from the president.
Jim also uses his skills to craft special shoes for those with disabilities. This is his favorite part of the job.
“It’s about helping people,” he said.
Jim remembers working with a North Georgia professor with a lopsided gait that kept her from walking freely.
“She rolled up in a wheelchair at my shop one morning and she said ‘I bet you can’t fix me,’” recalled Jim. “And I said ‘I bet I can.’”
Sure enough he did, as he constructed a thick-soled shoe that corrected the professor’s stride and freed her from her chair.

LABOR OF LOVE

While chatting in his office there’s a knock on his workshop door and a new customer walks in.
Paula Bingham has something in need of repair.
“I asked a friend can he do a leather jacket?” said Bingham. “And they said you can do anything.”
Foley is too humble to flat out agree to that. But in his own way he affirms it, as he assures Bingham it will be no problem. His new customer leaves the jacket and Jim adds it to the list of projects for the week.
The leather repair business is steady, said Jim. So much that he’s working a full forty hours a week in his shop. But that’s ok with him because he likes to keep busy.
“The day goes by that fast,” he said with the snap of his fingers.
Though he’s just entered his 80s, Jim has no plans to retire.
“I wouldn’t know what to retire to,” he said. “This is it. I prefer doing this. I like the people and when I’m all caught up I have the keys, I can lock the doors and go fishing.”
Jim is a thinker. He likes to ponder the mysteries of life. And he feels as though people don’t do that enough. For this reason he’s a dedicated student of Albert Einstein.
“He’s a seeker of knowledge,” said Jim. “Like Plato said ‘an unexamined life is not worth living.”’
It wasn’t until a few years ago that Jim unintentionally began to resemble his intellectual hero.
“It just bloody happened,” he said. “A few years ago at Gold Rush about ten people stopped me that day and told me I looked like him.”
When asked if he has any career advice for the younger generation, Jim doesn’t hesitate.
“Do what you love,” he said. “Just do what you love. Then it’s not work.”
And with that, Jim grins and heads back to his lengthy list of projects for the day.
A Shoe Guy on the job, 72 years and counting.