Haverhill's heritage came on with a loud stomping noise over the Fourth of July holiday, and it should be giving the city and nearby towns a signal to jump back into our rightful place in history.
From this weekend on, you will be seeing huge fiberglass shoes all around the city, painted and decorated to recall the city's past as a shoe-manufacturing giant and build pride for the future.
On top of all of this, the big shoes should be giving us a sense of fun and participation in a worthwhile city project.
They will remind me that my mother worked in shoe factories as a fancy stitcher and was proud of it all her life.
They will remind me that shoe factory jobs paid for all the three-deckers and other homes near the downtown part of the city.
Most of all, they will remind me that for many years, Haverhill was one of the world's foremost producers of shoes for women.
They will also remind some of us that the working skills and production ethics learned in shoe factories helped to get and keep Western Electric, later Lucent, here in the Merrimack Valley.
In addition to the actual big shoes, thousands of pictures of them on post cards were mailed out to all parts of the country and the world to promote the history and heritage of the city. Those cards were mailed with the hope they would set a new world record and give us plenty of favorable publicity. At the same time, the cards are further reminders of that heritage we are promoting.
The huge shoes are going to be with us for a long time. They will be on display for as long as the sponsors and buyers want to put them out in public. Certainly, for the rest of this summer they will be attractions for visitors and tourists as well as ourselves.
Projects like these, the shoes and the cards, bring the community together in many ways.
We celebrated the Fourth of July as a reminder this city has been involved in every action of real meaning in the country's background.
Now we celebrate our heritage as proud producers and citizens who honor the past and prepare for the future. (Sounds like an old high school slogan, but true.)
History and heritage are helping to reshape Shoe Town, the district where world production records were set, and the place where the past and present, and hopefully the future, are merging, as they did this weekend.
It is conceivable that the big shoe project will help bring us back together as nothing else has done since Haverhill won its All-America City rating several years ago.
The boots should help us to stomp into the future with a colorful set of heritage reminders that will be right in front of us for some time to come.
You won't be able to avoid them, and you shouldn't try.
That shoe heritage built the fine homes in the Highlands as well as the tenements around Lafayette Square and on Mount Washington and the Acre.
We might even want to have a Heritage Hike once a year, to see the old shoe district and remind ourselves of what we once did and are now doing. That would put shoe leather to work for the present and future.
The people who did the good work with the big fiberglass shoes have set a good example. They have shown us things can still be done here in a big way and they have helped to build up our pride in this heritage of ours, not only in shoes but in all of our history as an American community.
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Barney Gallagher has covered Haverhill since 1936 as a reporter, editor and columnist.
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