As a little country boy growing up in a tiny village in St Catherine I was fascinated and overjoyed when my mother returned from Kingston on the train with my Bata shoes.
This significant event usually happened at Christmas or in early September at the start of the school year. I was proud of my name brand Bata shoes and woe betide any boy, or girl for that matter, who dared step on my shoes at school.
All this came to mind a few days ago when I read in the Toronto Star that Thomas Bata had died at the age of 93. So who was Thomas Bata? The article stated that Thomas Bata was born in Prague in 1914 to a family of cobblers. Remember that word for shoemakers from your ‘First Aid in English’? Young Thomas apprenticed under his father and took over the family business in 1932. Seven years later he fled Nazi Europe for Canada where he established the Bata Shoe Company in Toronto. By the mid 1990s the Bata Shoe Company employed over 70,000 persons in 65 countries (including Jamaica) and was selling over 300 million pairs of shoes annually!
As a teenager at KC I no longer depend on my parents to buy my shoes for school, or for church. Of course, I depended on them for the “shoes money” and more often than not once I got the cash I visited one of the Bata Shoe Stores down town to continue the tradition which began when I was in primary school in St Catherine. I had no idea then that Mr Bata was an actual person or that he was Czech/Canadian! All I knew then was that his shoes were affordable, if not fashionable.
I cannot tell the last time I wore a pair of Bata shoes but a few months ago I was pleasantly surprised to see several pairs prominently displayed is a store window beside the likes of contemporary brands such as Bally, Rockport, Timberland and Mephisto.
Thomas Bata
On your next visit to Toronto you’ll probably want to pay a visit to the Bata Shoe Museum which, according to the Toronto Star, has a permanent collection of more than 12,000 shoe related artefacts – who knows, maybe you’ll glimpse a replica of the Bata shoes you wore to KC in your hey day!
Sport-focused school
A few months ago I wrote about the first sport-focused high school due to be opened in Toronto in September. Well it did. Apparently it took over ten years of planning by a few persons who were prepared to think outside the box. Read all about it in the Toronto Star at http://www.thestar.com/Sports/HighSchool/article/490359. As the Olympics Games in Beijing showed sports nowadays is big business and if you cannot be a Usain Bolt or a Michael Phelps then one can aim to be one of the thousands of coaches, agents, managers, physiotherapist, sport psychologist, nutritionist, etc who are working behind the scenes to produce these elite athletes.
Incidentally, a friend of mine (with KC connections) who lives in Toronto decided this September to send her fifteen year old son to a high school which has a special sports stream or grade. As she tells it, her son had to apply to attend this school and was subjected to a rigorous series of interviews before he was accepted.
The school or the grade he is in will cater to both his sports and academic needs and he hopes to graduate and attend university in a few years. He will have special make up classes before or after football games, training sessions and tournaments and his coaches will be in constant touch with his teachers throughout the academic year. It is not unusual for high school students from Toronto to take a year off to attend a high school in Europe but my football playing youngster is planning to take a year off to attend one of the several football academies in England; a move that his new Toronto school will encourage and accommodate.
All this came to mind a few days ago when I read in the Toronto Star that Thomas Bata had died at the age of 93. So who was Thomas Bata? The article stated that Thomas Bata was born in Prague in 1914 to a family of cobblers. Remember that word for shoemakers from your ‘First Aid in English’? Young Thomas apprenticed under his father and took over the family business in 1932. Seven years later he fled Nazi Europe for Canada where he established the Bata Shoe Company in Toronto. By the mid 1990s the Bata Shoe Company employed over 70,000 persons in 65 countries (including Jamaica) and was selling over 300 million pairs of shoes annually! 
As a teenager at KC I no longer depend on my parents to buy my shoes for school, or for church. Of course, I depended on them for the “shoes money” and more often than not once I got the cash I visited one of the Bata Shoe Stores down town to continue the tradition which began when I was in primary school in St Catherine. I had no idea then that Mr Bata was an actual person or that he was Czech/Canadian! All I knew then was that his shoes were affordable, if not fashionable.