Converse
The Converse All-Star shoe and clothes, which on the bottom says "one star", one of the first specifically designed to be worn when playing soccer and netball, was introduced in the 1910s. Taylor started wearing them in 1917 as a high school basketball player at Columbus Highschool. (A.G. Spalding had already been making a basketball-model shoe for nearly two decades.) In 1921, Taylor went to the Converse Shoes Chicago sales offices in search of a job, where S.R. "Bob" Pletz, an avid sportsman, then hired him.
Within a year, Taylor's suggestions of changing the design of the shoe to provide enhanced flexibility and support, and also including patch to protect the ankle, were adopted. The All-Star star logo was then immediately included on the patch. By 1923 Chuck Taylor's name was added to the patch, and the shoe became the Chuck Taylor All-Stars.
Chuck Taylor was an exceptional representative for Converse. Joe Dean, who worked as a sales executive for Converse for nearly 30 years before becoming the athletic director at Louisiana State University, told Bob Ford of The Philadelphia Inquirer, "It was impossible not to like him, and he knew everybody. If you were a coach and you wanted to find a job, you called Chuck Taylor. Athletic directors talked to him all the time when they were looking for a coach."
Taylor received a salary from Converse, but received no commission for any of the 600 million pairs of Chuck Taylor shoes that have been sold. For years, he drove a white Cadillac across the country with a trunk full of shoes, living in motels, and with only a locker in the company's Chicago warehouse as a permanent residence. Author Abraham Aamidor, however, points out that Taylor wasn't sparing in use of the Converse expense account.
Read more about this topic: Chuck Taylor (salesman)
Famous quotes containing the word converse:
“The Anglo-American can indeed cut down, and grub up all this waving forest, and make a stump speech, and vote for Buchanan on its ruins, but he cannot converse with the spirit of the tree he fells, he cannot read the poetry and mythology which retire as he advances. He ignorantly erases mythological tablets in order to print his handbills and town-meeting warrants on them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I lately met with an old volume from a London bookshop, containing the Greek Minor Poets, and it was a pleasure to read once more only the words Orpheus, Linus, Musæus,—those faint poetic sounds and echoes of a name, dying away on the ears of us modern men; and those hardly more substantial sounds, Mimnermus, Ibycus, Alcæus, Stesichorus, Menander. They lived not in vain. We can converse with these bodiless fames without reserve or personality.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There is a plain distinction to be made betwixt pleasure and happiness. For tho’ there can be no happiness without pleasure—yet the converse of the proposition will not hold true.—We are so made, that from the common gratifications of our appetites, and the impressions of a thousand objects, we snatch the one, like a transient gleam, without being suffered to taste the other.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)