Next to the Harvard Club in Boston’s Back Bay stands the old Eliot Hotel, named after Harvard’s most famous and probably most influential president, Charles William Eliot. The hotel was built in 1925 as a genteel way of easing aging Harvard professors into semi-retirement. In 1939 it was purchased by a private family and became one of the city’s finer hotels, with many amenities including a top-of-the-line Uneeda Shine-O-Mat. Any well-dressed gentleman striding out onto Commonwealth Avenue would be embarrassed to show a scuffed wingtip — and shoeshine boys were not exactly welcome in that part of town. The Shine-O-Mat, installed in about 1947, solved the problem.
The Eliot Hotel had its ups and downs over the years. Sometime in the early 1980s, the owners cleaned house, ridding themselves of furniture that had grown dusty and, in a moment of historical heedlessness, consigning the Shine-O-Mat to a near brush with junkdom.
Gentlemen readers of a certain age may recall the glory days of Uneeda Shoe Shine Machines, once a staple of drug stores and barber shops. Those versions were coin-operated (“Fast — Convenient”) and for 25 cents could put a gleam on your vamp and a smile on your face. The Shine-O-Mat was the upper-crusty version of Uneeda’s product line, suitable for venues such as the Eliot.
It consists of a large silver-colored metal box containing a durable motor that drives two spinning brushes, conveniently labeled black and brown, perhaps to assist the patron who is a little squinty-eyed from having one too many French 75s the evening before. (Note to those who need a refresher on 1940s cocktails: dry gin, Champagne, calvados, grenadine and lemon juice, named after the French 75-millimeter field gun in World War One.)
The Shine-O-Mat is not a piece of equipment that is likely to go wandering off. It weighs upwards of 100 pounds. It is as sturdy as Plymouth Rock and likewise served as the foundation of respectable society, when there was such a thing. Of course, by the 1980s, men were wearing athletic shoes and boots to work, boat shoes, loafers and campsides. Air Jordans arrived in 1985. The preppy look had no need for a shine, which would have implied a fastidiousness out of keeping with the relaxed self-confidence of the era.
What saved the Shine-O-Mat from the fate of tie pins and cufflinks was a university administration stubbornly devoted to the standards of yesteryear. John Silber was the president of Boston University, and he was a man resolute in his determination to defeat what would soon be called political correctness, but which he denounced as “short-pants Marxism.” Silber, appointed as BU’s president in 1971, had made a name for himself and his institution by opposing most of the intellectual fashions — as well as the actual fashions — of his day. And he gathered around him like-minded cultural recusants, one of whom was Sam McCracken.
Sam was an eloquent writer and the eye of his own personal hurricane. One could find him in his brownstone office on Bay State Road surrounded not merely with heaps of papers, but with hundreds of antique cameras and the innards of disassembled everything. It was Sam who spotted the Shine-O-Mat on its way out of the Eliot Hotel and who rescued it to install in John Silber’s administrative building. Just why he did this, I’m not sure. Sam had a speech impediment that made him hard to understand, but he did succeed in conveying the idea that properly shined shoes were the mark of a properly organized man. How this comported with his personal habits I was unclear. Sam had other dicta to live by. “Gentlemen do not use thesauruses,” he declared. And he would use no encyclopedia after the 1910 eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
In any case, from the mid-1980s to 2004, the Shine-O-Mat sat securely in the presidential quarters of Boston University. I understood it to be a sly appropriation of the legacy of Charles William Eliot, the only university president that Silber might have conceded was his intellectual equal. Eliot was one of the great savages in American higher education, introducing “electives” into the Harvard curriculum and setting in motion the eradication of nineteenth-century ideals of classical education. Eliot believed in the importance of “practical training” — and favored education at every level that contributed to the progress of American industry. Appointed as Harvard’s president at the age of thirty-five in 1869 and serving until 1909, he elevated Harvard to its position as one of the world’s most renowned universities. He also undertook a major effort to reform Boston’s schools. Silber, in effect, said, “Hold my beer.” Boston University did indeed vault ahead under Silber’s leadership, but it fell far short of the mark he had set.
And I know why. In 2004, Silber moved his administration out its lovely brownstone quarters on Bay State Road, to a penthouse suite atop the new School of Management. He left a lot of things behind, but especially the Shine-O-Mat. I disagree with those who say that the spirit of Charles Eliot — the spirit of the man who idolized American industry and prosperity and saw a profound connection between those ideals and American education — is embodied in the Shine-O-Mat. But it is true that the whir of the two great buffing wheels evokes the energy and confidence of that great educational innovator.
The Bay State Road offices were left to a clean-up crew who set about hauling off the debris to the dumpsters. I rescued the Shine-O-Mat, and in the years that followed, I dragged it with me from job to job, from my time as provost of the King’s College to my current role as president of the National Association of Scholars. The King’s College, not so incidentally, has lost its accreditation and appears about to close for good. The National Association of Scholars is thriving, but I should divulge that the Shine-O-Mat will soon be on its way to a restaurant in New Jersey where it will continue to brighten shoes and enlighten lives for decades to come.