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Photo By Kelly MackeyDon Willard resoles a pair of boots. He said his shop normally repairs more than 100 pairs each week.

Photo By Kelly MackeyDon talks to a customer on the phone in front of his wall of locks.

Photo By Kelly MackeyDon works on restoring a pair of men’s loafers.

The older he gets the more Don Willard appreciates his small downtown business on Broadway - Page’s Shoe Repair.

“We get to meet a lot of interesting people who come through the door,” says Don, 53, the friendly owner, who has one full-time employee, James Tandy. “I feel that both of us work hard at a dying art, and we’ve got 65 years of experience between us.

“It’s good to take something that somebody’s had laying back for years and didn’t want to get rid of, and you bring it back to life for them.”

Don says they recently re-sewed a banana back into the hand of a vintage toy monkey for a customer.

Selling high-quality boots and shoes and repairing them is still the bread-and-butter of the business. But there’s a lot more they do for their customers.

Around mid-morning on Wednesday, Jan. 6, Don is in the back of the shop carefully stitching a POW-MIA patch on a black leather motorcycle vest adorned with numerous other patches Don had previously sewn on for a friend.

Fifteen minutes later, Scott Quire, a retired U.S. Postal Service employee, enters the front door carrying a travel bag.

“Can you stitch it up or is it shot?” Scott asks Don, who’s sipping on a cup of coffee behind the counter.

“It’s been all over the world with me, to 25 countries, and I’m not ready to give it up yet.”

Scott likes Don’s answer that it can be mended.

“He fixes everything I tear up and it gets fixed perfectly,” Scott says. “When I leave something here, I know it’s going to be done right.”

They talk about the cold weather and the snow that’s predicted to arrive by Thursday, and traveling. Scott says he’s been to 57 countries so far and “my goal is to hit 100.”

Don smiles, saying if he ever gets to retire, “I think I’d like to work on Broadway a couple days a week,” at Page’s Shoe Repair.

“But I don’t want to think about sitting down anytime soon. I wouldn’t want to retire now, even if I had the money.”

Moments after Scott leaves, Harold Robinson comes in to pick up his black Florsheim Imperial wingtip shoes. They look new when they’re handed to the owner, but Harold says they’re 30 years old.

Imperials retail for $225 now, and Harold is happy to get his restored for $46.95.

“They do an excellent job here and they’re always cleaned up better than when I bring them in,” Harold says. “I hope they’ll be around another 30 years.”

“For both of our sakes, right?” adds Don, laughing.

The next customer wants to know if Don can repair a leather holster for a .38-caliber pistol if he brings it in.

Don says he believes he can.

“If it’s fixable, we’ll fix it for you,” Don says.

The man says he’ll be back in two days.

Next, a woman brings in a pair of tall, light pink boots, decides to get them brightened to “hot pink,” and thinks it’s worth $30 to leave them and let the shop do the dyeing.

And before Don can get back to repairing shoes, he quickly fixes a zipper on a woman’s winter coat for $3.

Don says their customers are “everybody from the local concrete construction worker to the doctor, lawyer and governor. I was repairing a pair of shoes for Brereton Jones this morning.

“A couple of weeks ago Glenna Fletcher brought in Ernie’s shoes and I saw them out at Pier 1 (Imports) the other night and we got in a conversation about his shoes.

“Julian Carroll comes in all the time, and Gov. Beshear, we’ve done work for him.”

He says Martha Layne Collins was a great customer when she was governor.

“We’ve done work for all of them,” he says. “We don’t see a lot of the younger generation come in, but when they do, they’re always amazed at what we can do and all the equipment we have.”

The shop has several different stitchers, nailers, buffing units and finishers.

“None of that stuff is cheap, either,” Don says. “But they last a long time. Two of the stitchers I’m using were here when I started in 1975. They’ve been rebuilt two or three times over the years.

“The same exact stitcher is made today. They just put a new one in a fancy cabinet and sell it for about $12,000. I just had a finisher rebuilt that cost about $3,000, and I recently went shopping and bought a $5,800 sewing machine in Illinois.”

The repair room also “has all the conveniences of home - a TV and coffeepot,” says Don, wearing a black cotton shirt with a small white Page’s Shoe Repair logo stitched on it, jeans, and black Justin boots.

He says if they limited their business to just shoe repair, “we’d stay caught up. But here’s a hunting vest I’m going to put a zipper in, and James is going to fix something with Velcro, and I’ve got another hunting vest in the back to work on, plus backpacks and purses.

“We do anything we can to help pay the bills.”

Don says there’s “still a decent living to be made” at the shop. “You’re not going to get rich. But you’re not going to get rich at anything these days unless you hit the lottery.”

In a tough economy the last two years, his business has remained steady, he says.

“We haven’t been any busier than normal, or slower. We have all we want to do. We repair between 100 and 150 pairs of shoes a week.”

He says a complete resole job can take an hour-and-a-half to do, “and if you’re putting on a pair of ladies’ spike heels, which are simple, it only takes about five minutes.”

But the shoe repair business has changed over the years.

“When I got in the business there were four full-time workers here and one part-time. One of the owners, George Poe, told me that in the late 1930s, there were 12 working in here, and he said they were open until midnight on Saturdays.”

That was before Walmart, Don says, “and disposable shoes made of plastic. We didn’t have all these Chinese imports.

“But one thing I’ve seen a lot of in the last year or so is people coming in who are wanting a boot or a product that’s made in the United States.

“When we first started carrying Justin boots and shoes (Page’s best-selling items), everything was made in the U.S. But now they’ve got an imported line from South China because they’re trying to compete with everybody else.”

In 1975 Don was remodeling the interior of Page’s Shoe Repair - “putting barn lumber on the walls” for a rustic look, which is still there - when he was offered a full-time job at the shop.

Don became Glenn Sewell’s partner in the business in 1979 and then bought out Sewell in 1982, he says.

Besides all the equipment and materials to restore old shoes, the shop with wood floors has lots of stuff from the past on the barn lumber walls: a bunch of antique locks; a deer hide and skull of some animal, “possibly a buffalo,” Don says; a large, framed old hand-painted Coca-Cola picture of a young woman in a swimsuit enjoying a Coke; a large Fehr’s Beer picture of the 1947 Kentucky Derby with the caption, “It’s always Fehr weather”; a “Drink Nehi Ice Cold” sign; a black-and-white framed photo of the entire 1958 workforce at Frankfort’s General Shoe Co., later Genesco Inc.; cowboy art, a framed newspaper with a banner “WAR” headline when the U.S. entered World War II, and much more.

There’s a Don story that goes with each piece of memorabilia inside the little shop sometimes called “Rumor Central.”

In addition to new boots and shoes, the shop has plenty of shoe polishes, dyes, brushes, laces, insoles, belt buckles and gloves for sale.

Store hours are 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, and 8 to noon on Saturday.

The toughest part of the job is the “overall stress that comes with owning a small business,” Don says. “You’ve got to do the bookkeeping, the check writing, the cleaning and be a janitor and plumber.”

He still manages to operate without a computer at the store.

Don has three daughters, Ashley Lanier, of Okeechobee, Fla., Jessica Callis, a freshman at Georgetown College, and Kymberley Willard, a senior at Franklin County High School; and two grandchildren.

To unwind from work, Don enjoys bowling and riding motorcycles, but not in frigid weather. He and his wife, Ruth, have four Harleys - 1967 and 1976 Shovelheads, a 1999 Fat Boy and a 2009 Ultra.

And a conversation about motorcycles inside the shoe shop never seems to be more than five minutes away - even on snowy days.

“Frankfort Faces” is a series that highlights people from within the Frankfort and Franklin County community. Each feature follows one of the city’s most unique personalities and includes a story, photos and video, which can be accessed online at state-journal.com.