A lot of interesting stuff in this one.

Smith, Leslie C. "Haberdashery A penny for your mocs." 9 Feb 1995. Globe & Mail.

WITH the advent of spring, 1995 and its attendant anti-glamour Gump styles, it seems only fitting that we turn our attention toward the feet.

The preference of American designers such as Calvin Klein and John Bartlett for high-water trousers and white socks, which are best highlighted by a pair of low-cut shoes, plus the prevailing prep sensibilities of perennial best-sellers Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger, have all combined to make leather mocs hot again.

And not just any moccasins, but those low-slung, penny-in-the-hole loafers known around the world as Bass Weejuns.

G.H. Bass & Co., America's number-one casual-shoe maker for both men and women, had a long and prosperous career well before Weejuns hit the shoe scene.

Founded in 1876 in Wilton, Me., by leather tanner George Henry Bass, one of its first (shoe) lasts was for the Bass Driving Boot, a sturdily built logger's boot that, save for some wicked-looking metal spikes sticking out from its sole, looks remarkably similar to the workboots of today.

Success with other labour-intensive designs followed. There was the farmer's Plow Shoe: a thick-soled, side-buckled ankle-boot, bearing an uncanny resemblance to the modern motorcycle boot.

During the First World War, fleece-lined Bass Flying Boots were developed to protect aviators' feet from freezing at high altitudes. Charles Lindbergh wore a pair on his historic 1927 flight across the Atlantic Ocean.

In 1930, G.H. Bass purchased the rights to the Sportocasin, a moccasin- style sporting shoe. Grass spikes were added to the moc and, in an early publicity coup, top-ranked amateur golfer Bobby Jones won his famed Grand Slam of that year attired in plus-fours and a pair of Sportocasins.

The popularity of Sportocasins must have been on the mind of the company's then president, Willard Streeter Bass, G.H. Bass's son, when, in 1936, he discovered a European fad for Norwegian-built moccasins.

Determined to duplicate the shoe's success in the States, Bass crafted a model made from vegetable-tanned leather, characterized by soft, pliant skin. An extra strip of leather, with a distinctive, crescent-shaped cutout, was stitched over the instep to enhance the shoe's fit.

In thus appropriating a European style based on North American traditions and re interpreting it anew for his fellow countrymen, Bass was only following his nation's fashion instincts. Much of our present-day casualwear - from camp shirts to designer jeans - has reached us in the same, roundabout way. Symbolic of this symbiosis, Bass christened his company's new shoe "Weejun," a contraction of "Norwegian" and  "Injun."

It took quite some time for Weejuns to catch on with the public. Back in 1937, Bass's nephew was castigated by his college fraternity for "wearing bedroom slippers during the day." For many years to follow, the moccasins languished in obscurity, only just being prevented from being dropped from the Bass catalogue by a small-but-loyal customer base.

But things changed in a big way in 1960, when the shoes were "discovered overnight" by students at the style-seminal University of North Carolina at Chapel Hall. A hotbed of prep fashion (khaki chinos and buttoned-down madras shirts were among other early sixties fads credited to the Tar Heelers), the school  soon had the entire nation toeing the Weejun line. Bass could barely keep up with the demand.

Other shoe manufacturers rushed to add Loafers (another company's trademarked name) to their inventories, all more or less copies of the Bass original. Although there are no exact figures available, the U.S. Mint must have found its own resources stretched to the max by moc wearers' new-found fancy for inserting lucky pennies into the decorative slashes of their shoes' straps.

Like all passions, the initial flame eventually fanned down. Today, Bass Weejuns are considered classic casual shoes and so typically American that it is easy to forget the European half of their heritage.

They are also almost inextricably linked in our minds to the Camelot era of John Kennedy - a fact which was not lost on the wardrobe stylists for Forrest Gump, nor, it seems, on the style setters for this coming spring.