CHAMPAIGN – Shoes always have been a part of Erma Ballard's life.

Her first job was in a shoe factory in Flora.

She learned how to repair shoes about 50 years ago and never stopped.

"It's hard work, and it's dirty, but it keeps me off the streets," Ballard said.

How did she learn the trade?

"I married it," she said.

Her late husband, Ferril, was a shoe repairer.

"When we were married, in the late '40s, there were seven (shoe) repair shops," she said.

Now, telephone directories list four in Champaign-Urbana and none in Danville. The number does not include Ballard's shop. She has no business listing and does not advertise.

"After World War II, (Ferril) got out of the service and came to Champaign, just because it suited him, I guess," she said. "He had been in some kind of Navy shoe shop ... he had a little shoe repair shop on campus, on Wright Street. He had so much business he asked his dad to help him."

The Ballard men did a lot of work on new shoes for retail stores such as the former Sholem's and Bunny's shoes for children.

"There would be a buckle missing or a strap loose," Erma Ballard said. "And, for the kids' shoes, we would take doctors' prescriptions and add corrective wedges.

"Back then, you still had shoes you could repair," she said. "The Chinese have come up with this new wrinkle," she said, showing a metal nail inside a hollow metal tube in the heel of a "lady's top lift" – a high-heeled shoe, in shoe repair parlance.

Traditional shoe repair machines cannot pull off the heels to repair them.

After Mr. Ballard's father died in 1953, an uncle from Clay County ran the family's repair shop for a while. Mr. Ballard worked for a dry cleaner business in Rantoul, for the railroad and with another shoe repairer, Frank D'Urso of Urbana. But when the uncle decided to return to farming, the Ballards moved the shoe repair equipment to their home on Garwood Street in Champaign. That's when Erma Ballard learned some of the repair techniques.

When her husband died, "I didn't know what to do. I wasn't old enough to retire. My biggest challenge was learning to use the stitcher. There was a guy in Mahomet who helped me. I got to thinking, 'Well, if he can do it, I can, too.' I'm so independent now, I don't think I could work for anyone else."

Her at-home business opens "whenever I wake up," she said. "I try to stay open until 4, and I try to be here on Saturday mornings. People let me know if they're here and I'm not."

The repair shop is an L-shaped addition on the back of her wood frame house. From the outside, only flowered curtains on the windows are visible.

But inside, the walls are lined with heavy black machines and boxes of parts. Eighty-four tiny drawers hold different sizes of nails and screws.

The shop also is Ballard's laundry room. On wash day, she has to move a padded, plastic covered board she uses as a workbench off the top of the washer and dryer.

Her daughter lives with her, but her only shoe repair partner is Cora, the cat. The gray tabby looks right at home among boxes labeled "Cat's Paw half soles."

Ballard has four kinds of stitchers: one with a straight needle that can fix a heavy horse harness; one with a curved needle that sews shoes in upside down positions; one that can sew right through a loafer-style shoe; and a large Singer called a patcher that does light work.

"I've used them to fix zippers and purses and jackets and I've even worked on golf bags, but I've about convinced them I am not set up for that," Ballard said.

A splitter machine that looks like an old washing machine wringer can cut a replacement sole into potato-chip thinness.

Old fashioned wooden shoe stretchers are hung on the walls.

"Summer's coming, so there will be more people wanting their shoes stretched," she said.

Her largest machine is a 7-foot-long belt sander with nine spinning discs.

"This one grinds off whatever you want: fingers, soles and heels," she said. "These are for different degrees of sanding; this one adds wax, you know, so that heels don't absorb moisture; and the rest are buffers – one brown, one black. That covers most heels."

Tops of the shoes are another matter.

"Some of the new shoes may look pretty, but if they're an odd color and you scuff them up, you're sunk," Ballard said. "Today, uppers are made of vinyl or what I call painted cheesecloth. You can't match the color, and they won't accept dye. The liners are paper."

"On some shoes, you probably can buy new ones cheaper than I can fix them," she said, as she pointed out three pairs of inexpensive women's shoes on her workbench.

A pair of vinyl slides needed new buckles; a pair of plastic flip flops, higher three-quarter-inch heels; and gold and silver high heels, new soles.

"The women just have to have it, a fix for favorite shoes," Ballard said.

Her most expensive repair is $46 for leather soles; the most inexpensive, $4 to replace the tips of soles on a pair of lady's pointed-toe shoes.

"It doesn't make a living, but it makes pin money," she said.

Despite the dirty work, Ballard has well-kept medium-length fingernails, painted pink.

"I can't work with short nails because I use them to pick up things and use them as screwdrivers," she said. "I work on them once a week so I can show them off in church."

Shoes brought in for repair are finished "most of the time, tomorrow," she said. "I've got to keep up."

It has been 20 years since her husband died.

"I never had any idea, after 20 years, I'd still be pounding leather," Ballard said.

Ballard's Shoe Repair

-- 108 E. Garwood St., C; entrance in back.

-- Open 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. most weekdays and most Saturday mornings.

-- 356-3012.

-- Cash or check only.

-- Pickups at Country Squire Cleaners, 1805 W. Springfield Ave., C; and Colony Square Cleaners, 701 Devonshire Dr., C.