POWELL — Gordon Ogle, 66, who sold jelly shoes from a stall on Clinton Highway, took a call about them Monday for the first time since the stall closed and has not yet gotten the shed open.
The caller was a woman from Farragut who had read in the News Sentinel that the shoes are coming back. They first turned up at the 1982 World’s Fair. When the stall closed Ogle put what was left in the shed behind his house on Emory Road. He counted 396 pairs when the roof leaked in 2004 and has not counted since.
“She wanted clear ones in an 8. I said I’d look. I’ve got mostly pink, and a lot of 5s and 6s, I don’t know who I thought was wearing a 5. They’re on two concrete blocks behind the tiller, and the tiller’s got to come out first.”
His wife, Bev, had asked for the shelf for her Christmas decorations. “I told her I had money in those,” Ogle said. “She’s got her Christmas stuff in there now anyway.”
He said he could not remember what he paid for the shoes. “I don’t know what to ask. A dollar’s what I got at the end, but it was a dollar because nobody wanted them. They were seven when I started. She asked me how much and I said a dollar, let me get them out first.”
Ogle found the key to the shed in a kitchen drawer, next to the padlock it used to fit.