Sunday, December 6, 2009
6:15 AM
Track Shoes
notice the real Adidas has only the trademark three stipes ,
while the generic has four.f you're gonna roll with me, you've got to know these things. lol
The shoe in the top two pictures is an Adidas. I didn't know, until I started doing research for this project that Adidas made this particular style shoe. How can that be? I'm the shoe queen. I know everything about shoes! The bottom pic shows the knock-off that so many of us wore.
All thought my elementary school years, this was the shoe most often worn by every kid of every age. What we apparently didn't realize back then was that the ones we were all wearing were the cheap knock-offs of the original Adidas running shoe. And since we didn't know any different, we didn't care at all that the ones we were wearing were the cheapies. Every young person I knew had at least one pair of these. Most people had multiple pairs in multiple colors. They were everywhere. It was the one time of my life when both my brother and I wore the same exact shoes. They were considered unisex and kids and teens alike wore them and loved them. Bernie and I used to get at least one brand new pair of them every spring, and then, usually again, in the fall. There were a few times when I used my own money to buy more of them because I couldn't get enough of them. I had the black/white, the red/white, the all-white, and the red/white/blue. In their day, they were every bit as popular as and Nike the world has ever seen. Even though they were the secret knock-offs, they cost $6 at Ray's, which was a lot of money considering most every other shoe in the store cost $3 or less. No one I knew had ever heard of a $30 sneaker at that time. ($29 was the cost of my very first Nike and that was considered outrageously high - I had to put them on lay-a-way at Penney's and pay them out in order to get them)
One Christmas Eve day, when I was in the 1st grade, the Dollar Store ran their children's shoes on a 2/$5 special. They carried both penny loafers AND track shoes (that's what we called these sneakers) so I was able to buy one of each with the traditional $5 that my Grandpa gave to me that year. Ask me if I was in heaven. A brand new pair of penny loafers AND a brand new pair of track shoes on the same day? Oh YES, please.
As you can clearly see, my shoe illness goes back to the very earliest days of my life.
My name is Maddie and I have a problem. : )