MEET SAM, CONVERSE ARCHIVIST

What’s your background and how did you get into this work?
I studied US History at Evergreen State. It's a weird, weird college in Washington with no grades. Then I was like, “What do you do with a history degree?” I went back to making sandwiches at the deli. My mom and grandmother were both librarians, and there's a branch of that called archive work that interested me. I went for Master’s degrees in Archives Management and History at Simmons College. I got two internships: Assistant Archivist at the Congregational Library and Archive cataloging images, and at the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the JFK Presidential Library and Museum, working with curators and researchers and giving tours. I found I liked explaining history to people as much as cataloguing it.

How did you go from sandwiches to sneakers?
I posted my resume on the Society of American Archivists’ website. Someone at Converse was like, “Where can we find an archivist? Oh, look, there's a whole group of them. Let's pull some resumes that meet our criteria.” I still have no idea what that criteria was. They asked me three questions: “What do you know about sports history, what do you know about the history of Converse, and are you comfortable cataloguing 3D objects?” Well because I'm from New England, I could fake being a sports enthusiast, and yes I could catalogue shoes. The town I'm from in New Hampshire is called Lyme, and that's where our founder Marquis Converse was born and raised—I learned to read at his Converse Free Library. Fifth grade was the year they gave you the town history, which was, “We did sheep farming for a really long time, and oh by the way, there's this famous guy who made the All-Star. He was the first person in Lyme to own an automobile.” I have a really good memory and that fact has always stuck with me. And Converse was like, “Who the heck knows about his car? Bring this guy in.” So I interviewed, and they hired me on the way home. I don't really have a background in fashion, footwear, design, any of that. I owned exactly two pairs of shoes when I started here. But now I have like 30 pairs, so clearly something's gone horribly wrong….

Are you part of a department? How do you interact with the rest of the company?
I'm basically part of the design studio but I interact with everyone in the company. I do archive tours, so I have hundreds of visitors. But I work with designers primarily. They can say, “Hey, we're interested in this shape, these ankle patches, this genre of shoe: running, skateboarding, whatever. Can you provide a Converse lens on that?” And then I can tell them all about it, or I’ll create a deck with imagery. I’m also the human verifier of dates/pictures/events. My favorite: someone mislabeled a picture of Bob Cousy on Wikipedia as Chuck Taylor, and forever people were sending me Bob Cousy pictures like: ”Is this Chuck Taylor?”

So is this the rockstar job of historians?
I'd say 95% of us are at academic institutions or museums. But really any product you can think of, there's an archivist there. A lot of companies have recently realized, Hey, we're an old company, our heritage has value as a marketing tool. Coke, Ford, John Deere, Carhartt all have large archives.

What's the best experience you've had on the job?
I love working with long-term employees, because they know how the business used to be. Like in the 1990s, there was a shift from bulky boot-like basketball shoes to more streamlined mid-cut shoes. In the bankruptcy years, the design team was gutted, and whole design language changed. Some of the shoes don’t even have Star Chevrons on them, because they didn't realize that was an important part of our identity. If you look at a wall of our basketball shoes, there is a distinct line in the sand. Like, oh yeah, everything after that is different. That's just one example from talking to people who've been here way longer than I have. The other great thing—their anniversaries come up and I’ll find their ‘first day at work’ picture from the old newsletter. You have a good laugh with people: “Here's what you looked like in 1987.”

What would you say is special about Converse?
That sense of community. Because it is so small and tight-knit, you know everyone's face. It’s like an 800-person school versus an 8,000-person school. Our earliest pamphlets have Marquis writing about “our footwear makers are fourth-generation shoemakers”, you know, he hired entire families in his community. As the leader of the company, he was very enthusiastic about his people. My perspective on it is there’s always been this infectious kind of energy.