FLUEVOG. John Fluevog

but back then it really was

      the Wild West. Everyone was doing pot, hash, LSD,

      mushrooms, angel dust, you name it, but nobody

      knew what it would do to you. A lot of people went

      to jail and a lot of people died. We romanticize it

      now, but people forget: the ’60s and ’70s had their

      dark side, too.

      Still, it was an exciting and fun time, with endless

      possibility.

      Then one day, about six months after we opened,

      a woman named Kecia Nyman walked into the store.

      She was tall and blond and beautiful with big smoke-

      blue eyes. It took me a day to start dating her and

      three months to marry her. Over five years of craziness

      followed. It was my ego that got me. It took me out

      and she took me out.

      Kecia was an international model with hundreds of

      magazine covers to her name, a superstar of the 1960s.

      Peter and John attend a hippie church

      and hire the street kids who attend

      services to make belts, bags and clogs

      in their Gastown store.

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      She was part of the jet set—the big exciting world

      of glamour and money and creative people—and she

      introduced me to it. Even though she was eight years

      older than me, my father, my pastor and my business

      partner all encouraged me to marry her. We used the

      ring she’d been given by her ex, the actor Peter Sellers,

      for a down payment on a house in North Vancouver.

      How suburban, right? We got a cute dog named Freddy

      Fluevog. We had a son named Jonathan. We had it all,

      for a little while at least.

      It was a refreshing time in a lot of ways, and a good

      time. For instance, there was the time we visited Mexico.

      In 1971, someone came into Fox & Fluevog and told us

      about these amazing antique shoes in a warehouse in

      Mexico City. I went down there with my extraordinary

      just-married wife and found these boxes of mostly baby

      shoes from the 1920s. We sold them all, like trinkets.

      But despite the myth everyone tells about us, they

      weren’t actually part of our shoe stock.

      Instead, Peter and I went to England and got our

      shoes made there with the help of people like George

      Cox. We’d go to shoe shows, and Peter would find

      a factory that he liked. Then we’d take the different

      components of the shoes they produced and mess

      around with them, trying different colours and stitching

      and heel shapes, and get the shoes made the way we

      liked. I wouldn’t call that designing, I’d call that line

      building. But we created unique shoes that you could

      only buy at Fox & Fluevog, like the knee-high boot

      that the director Robert Altman bought when he was

      in Vancouver filming the movie McCabe & Mrs. Miller,

      with Warren Beatty and Julie Christie.

      Then there were the clogs. In 1972, we attended

      St. Margaret’s Anglican, a charismatic hippie church

      near the Pacific National Exhibition grounds, where the

      street kids would go. We hired the kids to work in the