Today's Tidbit... 1935 GoldSmith Sports Equipment Shoes

This is the third of seven articles in a series covering the 1935-36 Fall & Winter GoldSmith Athletic Equipment catalog. Preceding each section of the catalog is a one-page cartoon about the history of that type of equipment, in today's case, football pants.

Click the appropriate link for other stories in the series:

Consulting Staff | Footballs | Shoes | Pants | Jerseys | Helmets | Shoulder Pads | Miscellaneous

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The cartoon introducing the catalog's shoe section is interesting because it focuses on the shoe's use as an implement for kicking the football. By 1935, only one or none of the 22 shoes worn by each team were used to kick the ball on a given play, so maybe they did not consider shoes used for running and blocking to be as interesting as their square-toed cousins. Sure, it was fun watching players hurriedly change from a standard shoe to a kicking shoe between third and fourth down or following a touchdown, and Princeton's J. Triplett Haxall kicked a 65-yard field goal following a fair catch in 1882, but most football players never kicked the ball. So, despite the cartoon’s kicking focus, the three other pages in the section primarily dealt with plain old football shoes.