Originally broadcast 5/12/08:
Jim Kirchherr tours the Brown Shoe headquarters in Clayton. For more than 130 years, the company has been making fashionable footwear—with its most notable brand, Buster Brown. The company’s archivist presents the history of this cartoon character and how it came to be a household name. Originally a comic strip cartoon, Brown Shoe bought the rights to Buster Brown for just a few hundreds dollars and first began promoting its shoes at the 1904 World’s Fair by hiring a circus midget and a trained dog to portray Buster and Ty. After the fair, the company sent these characters out to shoe stores to promote the brand. Recently, Buster and Ty were retired, but the Buster Brown name still lives on.
