Tie Yours On: The Story of a Shoe Lace Ball that started with Al Capone's laces.
This story begins in 1927. A young man working in a New York City barber shop had just finished shining and putting new laces in a customer's shoes. Al Capone, the visiting gangster from Chicago, climbed down from the shine stand, smiled, and handed 23 year old Jack Hughes a five-dollar tip. At that moment, unbeknownst to Hughes or Capone, a legend was born.
Perhaps it happened because of a generous tip; after all, it was the roaring twenties, and a shine went for a nickel. When asked, Hughes was quoted as answering: "It just sort of happened. I got to twiddling Capone's old laces around my fingers. That's how the ball got started." Over the following 53 years, the ball grew and grew as the famous and the not so famous added their laces - Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Joe DiMaggio, and Sonja Henne among them. Jack Hughes became famous due to both his ever-growing ball of shoe laces and the long-winded but precise slogan he made famous during the forties: "Pedal habiliment artistically lubricated expeditiously with luminosity and ambidextrous facility for the infinitesimal renumeration of .15 cents per operation."
Jack Hughes died in October 1980. However, his legend lives on, in the now 200-plus-pound, nearly 3-foot-wide ball of shoe laces, the world's largest.
The Pedestrian Shops and Boulder Community Hospital thank you for "Tying Yours On," and your tax deductible donation. Boulder Memorial will use your donation toward the costs of design and construction of a "state of the art" walking track system to be built on their grounds.
A multi-specialty team from Boulder Memorial Hospital is ideally situated for the walking track, on the western edge of the City of Boulder. Its grounds include both expansive level areas as well as many acres of Boulder's beautiful mountain backdrop. The track will be comprised of a network of paved paths of increasing demand, as to the distance and grade, assuring the system's appropriateness for everyone from the still hospitalized cardiac or stroke patient to the serious athlete involved in aerobic conditioning. The track will include "Burma-Shave" style signage designed to assure that a given walker takes the route most appropriate for his or her specific needs, as well as providing information including distance walked, distance to go, grade, and walking and health tips.