Workshop. The interior design was loosely
based on the library scene in the 1938 movie Pygmalion.
They tell me now that I
seemed so arrogant back
then, but it was because
I was insecure.
49
Director Robert Altman buys a
knee-high boot while filming the movie
McCabe & Mrs. Miller in Vancouver.
In August, after weeks of unrest, the
Gastown riot breaks out right outside
Fox & Fluevog.
John and Kecia travel to Mexico, where
they discover a warehouse full of
vintage children’s shoes. They come
back and sell them with the motto
Brand-New 50-year-old Shoes.
Not long after Fox & Fluevog opens,
international supermodel Kecia Nyman
walks into the store and walks out
with John’s heart. Three months
later, they’re married, and John is
hobnobbing with the jet set.
50
And I used to come to work dressed up in this three-
piece tweed suit with knickers and buckled shoes.
I was, like, hot stuff, right? But I was never a flake.
I was honest, I was hard-working and I was reliable.
Peter needed that kind of stability.
When I started doing this, I knew what people were
thinking and I knew how to tickle them. I wasn’t all
that smart in school, but I had more street smarts
than most people. Emotional intelligence or whatever
you call it. And I always understood women. I had
a strong sense of my feminine side. And strangely,
I ended up in this business where I make women
feel happy. Makes sense, right?
Our shoes were expensive—we’d sell knee-high
lace-up patent leather boots in five colours for men.
It was my ego that got
me. It took me out and
she took me out.
We started selling platforms. I had people flying
up from LA to buy my shoes. I was the man, selling
$270 boots for men. I suspect now that all my
customers were doing something illegal. Gambling.
Smuggling. Selling drugs. We talk about drugs in
the neighbourhood now, but back then it really was
the Wild West. Everyone was doing pot, hash, LSD,
mushrooms, angel dust, you name it, but nobody
knew what it would do to you. A lot of people went
to jail and a lot of people died. We romanticize it
now, but people forget: the ’60s and ’70s had their
dark side, too.
Still, it was an exciting and fun time, with endless
possibility.
Then one day, about six months after we opened,
a woman named Kecia Nyman walked into the store.
She was tall and blond and beautiful with big smoke-
blue eyes. It took me a day to start dating her and
three months to marry her. Over five years of craziness
followed. It was my ego that got me. It took me out
and she took me out.
Kecia was an international model with hundreds of
magazine covers to her name, a superstar of the 1960s.
Peter and John attend a hippie church
and hire the street kids who attend
services to make belts, bags and clogs
in their Gastown store.
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51
She was part of the jet set—the big exciting world
of glamour and money and creative people—and she
introduced me to it. Even though she was eight years
older than me, my father, my pastor and my business
partner all encouraged me to marry her. We used the
ring she’d been given by her ex, the actor Peter Sellers,
for a down payment on a house in North Vancouver.
How suburban, right? We got a cute dog named Freddy
Fluevog. We had a son named Jonathan. We had it all,
for a little while at least.
It was a refreshing time in a lot of ways, and a good
time. For instance, there was the time we visited Mexico.
In 1971, someone came into Fox & Fluevog and told us
about these amazing antique shoes in a warehouse in
Mexico City. I went down there with my
