Better than Cockleburs

After Sunday Mass in their Peruvian village, Toribio Condori and his wife slipped off their shoes to walk home in comfort. On the way, Toribio cut his toe badly on a rock. While he howled, his wife told him how lucky he was. "If you had not taken them off," and she pointed to the shoes dangling over his arm, "you would have ruined them."

Toribio and his wife, like others among the half of Peru's 4,000,000 Indians who have accepted the idea of foot covering, ordinarily wear cheap sandals made of llama skin or slabs of old tires. For reasons of poverty or prejudice, the Latin American Indian's sales resistance to anything better in shoes has been as tough as the calluses on his broad feet. Only one salesman ever dented it--and he was fictional, an O. Henry character (Mr. Hemstetter in Cabbages and Kings) who promptly sold out his stock after a clever schemer sprinkled the countryside with Alabama cockleburs.

Last week a real-life shoe salesman, Thomas Bata Jr. of the Czech shoe-manufacturing family, was confident that he could vastly improve on O. Henry's imaginary sales stunt. A new Bata factory (one of 37 in the free world) outside Lima will make 1,000,000 pairs of canvas and rubber shoes a year. Bata expects to sell them for 11 soles (70-c-) a pair through 46 stores and by circulating through the highlands demonstration vans with movies, native salesmen and balloons for the kiddies. "I think," Bata says, "I've got something better than cockleburs."

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