Does this look familiar to you?
If you were born in the 1960s or later, it probably doesn’t… unless you’re into antiques. This is a fluoroscope, and it used to be routinely found in shoe stores to help judge the correct size of shoes a person should buy for herself – or her child!
See those holes at the bottom? Your child would stand with his feet shoved into the openings, and then if you looked down through the scope on top, you would clearly see the bones of his feet, as well as the outlines of the shoes he had on. This would supposedly show you if there was ‘room to grow,’ in which case – the store manager hoped – you would happily buy the shoes.
One big problem, and it wasn’t clear until the darn machine had been in use for decades: radiation leakage.
In still-innocent 1953, I somehow ‘beat’ the machine when, at the tender-tootsie age of seven, I insisted that a pair of adorable black suede Mary-Janes were a perfect fit, because I was in love with them. They were definitely too small, but it was the only size they had in stock, and I squished my feet into them. Darned if I was going to let Maureen, my long-time babysitter, leave the store with me in tow, without those gorgeous shoes.
“Are you sure? Are you sure they feel all right?” she kept asking me, not wanting to mess up this errand she was performing for my mother. The fluoroscope must’ve shown that my toes were right up against the toes of the shoes. But the salesman kept quiet – he wanted the sale! Maureen finally gave in; I was fiercely stubborn, and she was 14.
I remember wearing them on the walk back with Maureen to my parents’ dry-goods store. It was all of two blocks away. By the time we got there I was limping!
The shoes went right back to the store. Yes, I cried, but I got over it… eventually. I still have a soft spot for Mary-Jane-style shoes, though. 🙂
Crossed Eyes and Dotted Tees 
I loved checking out my feet in those machines.
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What a sad shoe story! We always checked our feet in that machine. Hopefully we didn’t buy so many shoes that our present health is endangered.
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Welll, it’s all about dosage, isn’t it. Did you read the link to the Wikipedia article? I think it took a LOT of cumulative exposures. I mean, you would’ve had to have been Imelda Marcos. 😀
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LOL! I didn’t see the link, so I went back and read it. I’m not going to stay up all night worrying about it. That would be more injurious to my health than long past radiation exposure.
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Larry’s??
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No, this was a store on Monkland Ave.
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Remember it well!
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No machine in my past, but plenty of Mary-Janes. Still love them!
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Astounding what ‘modern inventions’ were determined to be ‘good for you’. I believe opium was once used to help people kick alcohol addiction. They sprayed DDT at beaches where children were playing. And let’s not forget Thalidomide. It’s a wonder we ever survive as a species when science itself has a habit of being used against us!
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You are *so* totally right! On the brilliant series, The Knick, they use heroin to ‘wean’ a patient off his coke addiction. (The setting is approx’y 1910 New York.) Thalidomide has to be the nadir of examples of this. So tragic! Either they were just stupid or – AND they didn’t test these things enough, for all possibilities. They were in too much of a hurry to make piles of money.
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One would like to think it wasn’t deliberate idiocy…but that might be giving the pharmaceutical companies too much credit. Just look at what’s happening in Flint, Michigan with the water supply to make you question the humanity involved in the decision making.
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Yes, it’s chilling, indeed, to think of the utterly callous disregard for the human cost of such pollution/poisoning. But we should be used to it. It goes waaay back. 😞
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Lucky for me those machines were before my time.
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♪♫♪♫ You put your left foot in,
You take your left foot out,
You put your right foot in,
You take your right foot out,
You do the glowy-glowy…
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😀 Ignorance was bliss, I guess.
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