Stocking Stuffer Alert

It could have been/should have been the archetypal American success story: Diminutive Gustav "Skip" Bixby (an immigrant from Bohemia via Qatar, and the eventual great uncle of erstwhile TV personality Bill Bixby) started out as a shoeshine boy in a Camden, New Jersey, train station at the age of eleven in the early 1900s. Although he eventually moved on to hardware, marrying the boss's daughter (Olabelle Simone Huxtable), something about polish always attracted him. After taking a correspondence course in chemistry in the 1920s, and tinkering away at the cellar sink for a couple years, Gustav perfected the concoction that for a while would make him rich: a shoe polish he half-named after his adoring wife, Shinola.

Through some clever advertising and the downright quality of his product, Shinola sales rose gradually through the 1930s, providing Gustav, Ollabelle, and their ever-expanding brood a quite comfortable life, despite the woes of the Great Depression. And then Gustav got his big break, which, cruelly, also became his tragic downfall--World War II. The Shinola-Bixby Corp. won the exclusive contract to provide the Armed Forces of the United States of America with boot polish. Gustav went to sleep proudly every night during the long conflict, knowing that his pride and joy was being carried in every G.I.'s kit. "Oh just wait," he'd proclaim to Olabelle in bed, "when those soldiers finally capture Hitler, he'll be made to look down and see his defeated image reflected in each of their boots!"

Unbeknownst to Gustav at the time, though, those same U.S. soldiers had taken quite a shine to Shinola for reasons beyond the nice glean it gave their tired, liberating feet. It seems that one grunt in particular, a rather slow-witted (or as the wikkans call it, someone of "low acuity") Kilroy by the name of Lawrence "Lunk" Pinch, stationed in a barracks in Dartford, England, serving as nothing more than a valet for one General Sheldon "Shelly" Winters, proceeded to shine his boots one night (without the aid of any booze, Sgt. Maurice Amsterdam always claimed) not with his handy tin of Shinola but with a pile of manure the barracks pet chocolate lab Grable had unfortunately left near Pinch's bunk.

Even in those halcyon pre-Internet, Twitter, and cell phone days, the legend of Pinch's inability to distinguish shit from Shinola spread like, in Sgt. Amsterdam's patois, "the clap in a Memphis cathouse." Seemingly overnight even Japanese prisoners on obscure Allied-occupied atolls in the Deep South Pacific were accusing each other and their captors of not knowing the difference between "cacca cacca and Joe DiMaggio's Shinola."

Two days after V-J Day, Gustav and Ollabelle and their seven would-be Shinola heirs and heiresses moved into a luxurious mansion on the outskirts of Bedminster Township, New Jersey. Five years later, as the crude idioms of those victorious G.I.'s permeated everyday American speech, the Bixby's, reeling from the plummeting sales of Shinola, quietly moved to a modest colonial in Newark, where within months Gustav took to his bed and never donned a newly shined pair of shoes for the remaining six years of his life. His eldest son, Dexter, somehow kept the company afloat into the sixties, but the damage was irreversible. "It's a crude truth," he said upon shutting the business down on June 16, 1965, "when your nemesis is shit, you don't have shit."

And so, as much as you may want to, you can't run down to the corner store these days and buy some Shinola. But thank God for the World Wide Web. In case you need to find that extra special gift for a significant other, heroic veteran, or that dim-witted co-worker of yours, e-Bay has all your Shinola needs right here, no shit.

Bare Jr.-Shine