Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?
By John R. Powers

312 Pages • $12.95

Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?
By John R. Powers

About the Author  •  Links about the Author

Freshman Eddie Ryan surveys the scene at Bremmer High School on Chicago’s South Side with the eye of a cynic wise beyond his years: 

On the marble stand [beneath the statue of St. Patrick Bremmer] were some words written in Latin, which supposedly said something about Catholic education being the best way to turn a fine young Catholic boy into a fine young Catholic man. Timmy Heidi claimed that the English translation was, “Welcome, Suckers.”

Directly behind Bremmer High School was its huge “athletic field.”  The athletic equipment consisted of grass.

Being a teacher, Brother Coratelli couldn’t come right out and state that he hated my guts, so he said it in the same way that all teachers say it to students: “I don’t like your attitude.”

Teachers are great ones for saying one thing and meaning another. For instance, when they say, “I’m disappointed in you,” they really mean, “Just what I expected.”

Eddie, the narrator of John Powers’s comic novel Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? is an Irish Catholic Holden Caulfield—a teenage literary character whom the reader immediately recognizes as a familiar figure. Eddie is the bright, funny kid who can make you laugh just by describing the ordinary things you do in school every day. He pretends to be a cynic who can see through everyone’s poses and pretensions, but, by his own admission, Eddie has “an overactive gullibility gland.” He wants to be a good person, and he suspects that the nuns and priests and brothers and hardworking blue-collar parents on the South Side might know something important about how to do this.

Eddie is, in short, the perfect vehicle to convey the tone and flavor of the urban Catholic subculture of the late 1950s and early ’60s. He’s a sardonic but sympathetic observer of the mores, social structures, and courting rituals of a rich and complex culture in full flower—just as this culture was about to change forever. The book was an instant hit when it was published in 1975 because it so vividly described a way of life that was shared by millions of American Catholics.

The novel is still read thirty years later because it makes us think about what we lost when the Catholic subculture vanished. Take sex, for example. The fun that Powers has with the sexual mores of the times begins with the book’s title and continues page after hilarious page as he details the priests’ and nuns’ fixation with the way young people dress, date, and socialize. But are today’s courtship rituals any improvement? Were these celibates wrong to be worried about the consequences of separating sex from care and commitment?

Powers makes us laugh at the folkways of Catholics from this bygone time. But he also conveys the majesty and power of the Catholic culture. For all its faults, the culture of church, parish, and school, of ethnic neighborhoods and close extended families, of bowling leagues and the Altar and Rosary Society was an enormously effective way to pass on worthy social and spiritual values to the younger generation.

Powers’s novel also shows the cracks in the Catholic culture. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the Catholic system had efficiently turned generations of immigrants into good Catholic Americans. But it was fraying by the time John Powers reached puberty in South Side Chicago. Young Catholics were restless. The church’s teachings seemed to consist of “thou shalt nots.” A sexual revolution got under way. America got bogged down in the Vietnam War. Women started becoming feminists. And the church itself embarked on the massive internal changes set in motion by Vatican Council II.

Powers’s generation was fated to be the last to be shaped by the Catholic system. The priests, brothers, and nuns gave them a rough time, but the truly painful times lay in the future. As Eddie Ryan’s Uncle Elmer tells him, “These are your fun years.”

Eddie’s tale shows that ordinary life offers opportunities for hope, heroism, friendship, kindness, and love—and, of course, humor. As a conduit for this last virtue, Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? will be remembered for many years to come.

Back to top

About the Author (click here to learn more about this author)

John R. Powers was born in 1945 on the South Side of Chicago. He earned a BA in sociology from Loyola University Chicago and an MA and a PhD in communications from Northwestern University. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Studs Terkel, a Chicago radio personality and writer known for his oral histories (Hard Times, The Good War). Powers was a professor of speech and performing arts at Northeastern Illinois University for six years. He also created and hosted a number of specials for Chicago public television during this time.

Powers’s writing career began at the age of sixteen, when the Chicago Tribune published a column he penned. Years later, he started writing about growing up Catholic during the 1950s and 1960s, because, he says, no one else had.

“You write what you know about,” he says. “No one had ever written a book about the culture of growing up Catholic. I wanted to write a humorous social portrait of Catholicism in the mid-twentieth century.”

Powers’s stories first appeared in the form of articles written for Chicago magazine. The novels followed in quick succession: The Last Catholic in America (1973), Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? (1975), and The Unoriginal Sinner and the Ice-Cream God (1977). He has written one other novel, The Junk-Drawer Corner-Store Front-Porch Blues (1992), as well as Odditude: Finding the Passion for Who You Are and What You Do (2007).

Powers’s “fictionalized memoirs” of growing up Catholic have found life beyond the printed page. In 1979, a musical production of Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? opened in Chicago and ran there for three years. Powers produced the Chicago show full-time, as well as other productions of the play in other major cities. Powers has also produced and starred in a one-man show called Life’s Not Fair . . . So What?

John Powers and his wife, JaNelle, have two daughters, Jacey and Joy. He lives in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and is a motivational speaker. He speaks to about ninety companies, professional organizations, and community groups a year.

Back to top

Links for John R. Powers

John Powers’s Web site

Back to top