After 88 years, Lafayette staple Kenny's Shoe Repair to close its doors

LAFAYETTE, Ind. — The tips of Rick Roswarski’s hands are black with shoe grease, the darkness from a shoe sole seeping into the deep lines in his fingers and his hands gently shaking as he picked up a boot.

The familiar, high-pitched scraping sound of a cobbling machine rings loud in the background as his son-in-law begins work on another repair.

The boots he grabbed aren’t just any ordinary pair. It’s a Thoroughgood boot, or, as he described it, the only boot his combat-injured Uncle Bob would wear. He examines the boot more, giving notice to the right arch on its sole.

“He got out of the Army, his right arch was crushed (when) something came down on it,” he said. “This sold back, oh goodness, ‘55? 1956? … And since it was filled, it held his arch. It’s the only boot that would ever do that. He never changed boots.”

For the last six decades, Roswarski has been repairing shoes for the Lafayette area and beyond. But at the end of this month, Rick will turn 70. And as he enters into the new decade, he looks to leave the last five behind him.

Kenny’s Shoe Repair and Orthopedic rests beside Loeb Stadium. Dated red brick lines its exterior and a wooden shingle roof that hangs past the brick foundation sits like a hat atop its head.

After 88 years in business, Kenny’s will close for good on March 31.

The family business

Cobbling has been in the Roswarski family since Rick was a boy, who learned it from his father, Ken. But the store did more than just repair shoes. They repaired just about anything, a motivation that’s continued to this day.

In addition to the shoe repair side of the job was dying clothes. But this was long before the days of tie dye. Rick’s dad used a liquid dye and compressed it into a spray, but what he didn’t know was that the spray was carcinogenic.

“Dad was an old-time cobbler. The way he was taught, you could throw them in your mouth and take them out of your mouth one at a time and just nail them. He was really, really good at it. You learned a lot of this in the Navy, but,” he stops a second, his voice becoming quieter. “(The spray) transferred from the nails to the inside of his mouth. So when he ate food, he took it straight in, and he had cirrhosis of the liver from that. He died from that.”

Ken died at 42. Rick was just 14 years old. After school, Rick and his 19-year-old brother, Ken, helped manage the store, and the day’s earnings went to support the family.

Rick would end up throwing all those dyes away.

Years later, Rick left the business to go work for the federal government as a grain inspector for four and a half years, leaving Ken to run the store. But being a grain inspector didn’t sit right with Rick, he said, and maybe some familiar scenery is what he needed most. He found his way coming back to the shoe repair shop, only to see his brother putting shoes into cardboard boxes the minute he stepped through.

Ken wanted to be a carpenter and was looking to sell the business. What he didn’t know was that he was talking to a potential buyer.

“I went down to the bank, borrowed what was necessary, came back and I said, ‘You’re good to go.’”

Rick bought the store and became its owner in 1977. He was 22 years old.

‘We can fix anything’

Shoe repair may be what the business markets itself for, but it’s not where the repairs stop.

“We can fix anything,” Jenny Roswarski, Rick’s wife, said. “From Jeep tops, boat tops, trampolines, suitcases, purses.”

It seemed as if she could go on, but there is a line.

“If we look at something and know, even if we fix that part, the other parts are going to break … you don’t want to fix (it),” she said. “I could fix this little part, but the rest of it’s going to break.”

In the back of the business and pushing past several dozens of clothing designs ranging from professional attire to a purple, starry purple blouse hanging on the racks above a doorway, is its clothing operation, where employees like Laura Killian work on anything from stitching up deteriorated leather jackets to creating new creations from the tatters of other clothes.

Among the strangest things Killian said she’s repaired was a 100-year-old leather rhino.

“Corey, did you remember the leather rhinoceros that I worked on?” Killian asked Rick’s son-in-law, Corey Guthrie.

“Nope,” he said. “It didn’t stab me in the butt or anything.”

Killian found her way to Kenny’s after being a nail technician for almost 15 years. They met through a ballroom dance instructor. She said she was trying to get out of the profession already and the opportunity allowed her to make the shift.

But ballroom dance was responsible for more than one relationship at the company. After his divorce, Rick found his way into ballroom dance because he “always wanted to learn to waltz.” Six months later, Jenny, a then-widow, joined.

“It was interesting, because even from across the room, it was kind of like, ‘Hm,’” she said, laughing.

Jenny and Rick started dating in 2009 and married in 2013.

After about a year of dating, Jenny quit her job and began working at Kenny’s full time, something she described as a trial by fire.

“I knew about colors and things,” she said. “One of my parents had been an art major, so when I made backdrops and things, he taught me a lot, yeah, about color. And then some of it was just pure trial and error.”

The future

With retirement on the horizon, Rick has his sights on a vacation in his near future but also wants to start a new hobby.

“Maybe kendo,” he said. “It’ll be good for my shoulders, because my shoulders are a wreck, yeah? And so it’ll be a good thing for my shoulder. I just have to start slow, yeah.”

Rick and Jenny share 14 grandkids across the country who will “keep them busy.”

And though Kenny’s may not remain anymore, the teachings of his father now live in Rick’s son-in-law.

Kenny said he fired 14 people before he found Guthrie. “Corey’s the only one who’s been through the fire with me.”

Guthrie, who Jenny called the “future shoe repair person in Lafayette,” now looks to start his own shoe repair business and is venue shopping for a new location.

He said he’s playing around with different names right now, but “sole healer” has a certain ring to it.

This article originally appeared on Lafayette Journal & Courier: After 88 years, Lafayette staple Kenny’s Shoe Repair to close its doors