The Baltimore Sun from Baltimore, Maryland • 21

THE SUM Entertainment Trends Comics Tuesday, December 9, 1975 Bl All about why there aren't any heels By GABRIELLE WISE what you mean." He looked at the bottoms and asked what the patent notation meant "The concept is protected," he learned. His wife thought he was kidding when be said, "How'd you like to bring these shoes to America." She wanted to wear them a while before any big decision was made. "In the meantime I'm saying, "What's happening to Eleanor Jacobs recalled. "Believe me when I tell you, we climbed a glacial mountain, a two-hour rock climb to the glacier. I was skipping over this mountain, saying I can't believe it's me.

The only thing that's changed is the shoes." That convinced her, and her husband was convinced, too, and called Anne Kal-so, who in 1957 invented the shoes in Copenhagen. They told her they'd been wearing ber shoes, and would like to distribute them in the United States. "Are you in the shoe business?" the designer asked. "No, we're artists," the Jacobses told her. "In that case, I will speak to you," Anne Kalso said.

She was not interested in talking to shoe people. The New York couple learned, moreover, that she had been approached by American manufacturers who wanted to make a deal with her, but she said no thanks. "But we came along as artists. As artists she knew we had some feeling about the shoes, rather than just terest, however, were beginning to take their tolL "I was buying shoes as I went along, every sensible pair of shoes I could get my hands on. But nothing helped.

There were doctor this, and doctor that shoes, Swedish clogs and German shoes. The car was getting loaded up with shoes, my disposition was getting grouchier and the weather remained hot" The Jacobses came to Copenhagen and, as they headed toward the Tivoli Gardens, passed a shoe shop, and "there were these strange looking shoes in the window. They were ugly. I looked at Ray and he looked at me. "He said, Do me a favor, try He went for a walk and I went in the shop.

He couldn't bear another shoe store." The sales person spoke no English, but managed to find Mrs. Jacobs a pair of 7ft B's and put them on her feet "As soon as I stood up I said, and 'What is "I started walking around. This is what I'd been looking for. Anybody speak English? What do you know about these shoes?" There were two couples in the store, one from Dallas who had been coming to Denmark every two years to get the shoes because they weren't available "anywhere else in the world" and they "could not live without them" and a couple from Spokane who said the same thing. It was not long before Mr.

Jacobs, too, had on the shoes and said, "I see During an evening at Mrs. Kalso's apartment, the Americans learned that their Danish hostess was a former yoga teacher, and before that a couturier, a designer of clothing for ballet and theater and one-of-a-kind items for wealthy women. Eleanor and Ray Jacobs opened their first store "on the street where we live" on April 1, 1970, at 117 East 17th street in New York. It is off the beaten track, a residential area. "Nobody with sane mind would ever open a shop on that street," Mrs.

Jacobs said. "By afternoon the store was filled. It was Earth Day 'round the world. "We had been working on a name, on 'what to call them. A whole bunch of kids was going by, to a happening in Union Square.

It was Earth Day. "Ray looked at me and said, 'I've got It. It's Earth Day! So the trade mark "Earth Shoes" was born. There are now 85 identifiable imitations on the market Mrs. Jacobs acknowledged, but "they're just visual imitations." Not the real article with the negative heel and the higher toe.

Also an imitation is the small gold one Mrs. Jacobs wears on a chain around her neck. It was made, she said, by one of the store owners, a former goldsmith from Allentown, Pa. Now there are 100 Earth Shoe stores about the country, selling a line that begins with sandals for $23.50 and goes on to $49.50 boots. And all because one traveler's feet hurt Eleanor and Raymond Jacobs claim they've gone from show business to shoe business, all because they took "an earned vacation in the arts" and their feet hurt Raymond was a New York photographer, and she was a painter, but after a "debilitating and demoralizing" experience in film-making, they knew they didn't want to make any more, Changing careers, Eleanor said while In Baltimore yesterday, is not a frightening experience for her husband, since he'd been in his father's fur business since the age of 12 and then switched to commercial photography when be was 30.

"Let's do something we've never done before. Let's take a long vacation and get away from this country, let's go to Europe and forget everything and somehow well find something," is the way Mrs. Jacobs put it Her husband and two daughters apparently went along with her philosophy of "never be afraid of tomorrow," and with no plans to speak of, a lot of studio equipment Mr. Jacobs didn't think he'd be needing was sold off and they put together enough money to sail away on the S.S. France in June, 1969.

But because of the heat wave-it was 98 in Paris they headed for Scandinavia. "We're not hot weather addicts, so we continued north." The trips to galleries and churches and other places of in Remembering the greatness of Ralph Bunche t3pSt gaiasassa Sunpapers photo Charles Watson Eleanor Jacobs with Earth Boots Love I AvV 1 I lA-. Sr-l f.3fe SsNjb -yM v.M '--t By ISAAC REHERT Today is the fourth anniversary of the death of Ralph Bunche, and his biographer, Peggy Mann, is determined that the memory of a statesman of his magnificent stature should not be allowed in only four years to lapse. For even as the simplest of success stories, Ralph Bunche was anybody's ical school and then is rejected can be devastated. In sophomore year, many students who are asked to pick a major subject see the choice "as a life-sorting process that is crucial in their eyes." The pressure they feel is so great that they sometimes drop out of school she said.

"An undergraduate education Is designed to give you more flexibility," she said. "If you come to a university as rich In resources as Harvard is, there are things to study' that you don't even dream of in high school." Many people now reject a liberal arts education in favor of specific vocational training, Dr. Horner said, but "I never felt that the main value of an education was vocational" Liberal arts gives yon "the tools for life outside your job," she said, as well as greater flexibility in changing careers if necessary. "The pressures of young women today are to make a commitment to a career, then find something satisfying for their lives," Dr. Horner said.

"That can be a cause of frustration and disappointment" XalfhtNewiScnfcfl Horatio Alger hero, overcoming insuperable odds to make a name for himself. Add to his handicaps, besides abject poverty, that he was black and that every adult in his early life collapsed into dead loss, and the significance of his attainments are many times magnified. In his childhood, his father deserted the family; his mother died of tubercu- losis; and his Uncle Charlie, who had come to be his surrogate father, shot himself in the head. The young Ralph earned money during high school by laying carpets after classes; as a student at the University of California at Los Angeles, he paid his own way by working as a janitor and as a mess boy on Pacific Coast steamships. He was denied membership In his high school honor society because he was black, yet he went on to Harvard University to become the first black there to be awarded a doctorate in political He was the first black to hold a high ranking job in the United States State Department When, at the conclusion of World War II, the Dunbarton Oaks Conference was called to create the United Nations, he was the only black official there.

And as the new postwar conditions began spawning new nations around the world, he was a kind of midwife to two of them: the Congo and Israel. In the Congo, when the independence movement erupted while he was on a mission there, for three weeks he was the sole guardian of stability and order, with no legal mandate, no legislative partner and no troops, single-handedly keeping a seething nation from tearing itself to bloody shreds. In the Middle East he was the chief negotiator charged with arranging an armistice at the close of the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948. And in arranging that armistice, he attained what no statesman has since been able to duplicate: he had Israelis and Arabs sitting around the same negotiating table, talking with one another and, incidentally, even learning to like one another in the process. For his role in that peacekeeping mission, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Miss Mann, who spent much of the past five yean researching her newest biography, "Ralph Bunche: U.N. Peacemaker," feels he is one of the greatest Americans of all time, on a plane with Washington and Jefferson. She wrote her book to help rescue his memory from loss and visited Baltimore recently to talk about that book, as well as two others of hers that have appeared in the past few months. Why is it that Ralph Bunche is hardly a memory today? Because, said Miss Mann, people don't know the man. To present-day whites, he seems just another international statesman; and to present-day blacks, he is too establishment not nearly militant enough.

Actually, said his biographer, as a statesman he inaugurated a practice that if followed might have brought far more felicitous results to the troubled Middle East For even after that first conflict the Arabs had declined to sit down with Israelis to confer, prefering that Bunche shuttle back and forth between the belligerent parties. But he refused; be replied it was unfitting for him to be cast in the role of an errand boy and he Insisted that all parties concerned convene in the same room with him. The result Miss Mann said, was sparks of beginnings of friendly relations. Unfortunately, to later negotiations, This picture was taken in 1951 when Ralph Bunche was being awarded a doctorate of laws at Morgan State College. -WtMmii wkhm :t77.V over career As president of Radcliffe College for women at Harvard University, Matina Horner Is one of the most influential female voices at one of the most influential schools in the country.

Yet she makes a strong argument for putting love over ambition. In this case, Dr. Horner means putting love of your work over ambitions for success. Most of the young women arriving at Harvard today, Dr. Horner says, concentrate on getting into medical school or law school as the only sure routes to success.

At a time when there is a "wide range of possibilities" opening up for women and minorities, she said, many students have a "sense that there are only a few options in life doctor, lawyer or failure." But Dr. Horner said that women of her generation-she is 36-often found success not by picking a particular route to it but by finding something that fascinated them and pursuing it Their secret lay in "being absolutely enamored with a particular subject" she said. Dr. Horner's fascination was with motivational psychology. After she graduated from Bryn Mawr College, she said, "I had no Interest in being a psychology professor," but ber interest in pursuing her work led her to graduate school and then "on to other things." The graduate school that Matina Hop ner attended was the University of Michigan, and the work she did there led to both her ascension to power at Radcliffe and her prestige as a feminist In tests she administered to students at Michigan in the mid-1960's, Dr.

Hop ner found that many bright women, despite their professed ambitions, become anxious and troubled when actually faced with the prospect of success. Success and competition with men are regarded as unf eminine in the "dominant stereotype," Dr. Horner found, and that stereotype was putting internal pressure on women who went against it When Dr. Horner got to Harvard, she found male-female stereotypes permeating the university in the Harvard house system where the men resided with faculty members inaccessible to women; In the 4-to-l male-female admission ratio; in the fact that years ago there were only 4 women, all assistant professors, among a faculty of 700. At one point Dr.

Horner even had a group of men students who told her they were taking ber class not because they were Interested In psychology, but be- Dr. Matina Horner being escorted to her installation as president of Radcliffe College in 1972. The inevitable trouble came; but in dealing with it rather than surrendering their flowers, the family was successful in inspiring the belligerent neighborhoods with a similar affection for flowers. The result of the real-life event was a Reader's Digest article by Miss Mann called "The Miracle of the Flower Boxes." Out of the article grew a children's book called "The Street of the Flower Boxes," which NBC-TV then turned into a special and about which Whitney Young, then executive director of the National Urban League, said: "I have rarely come across a book for young people which advances the cause of ethnic and economic integration as naturally and realistically." Subsequently the New York City Housing Authority began sponsoring a summer garden contest among its public-housing tenants and Charles A. Lewis, a horticulturist who served nine years as judge, commented that "Gardening may well be an instrument for great healing in our troubled cities." Miss Mann is also the author of "Gol-da a recent biography of Golda Meir, and of "The Man Who Bought Himself," the story of Peter Still a slave who saved enough money to buy his own way to freedom.

In addition, she has written 20 other books for adults and children. shuttle diplomacy became the pattern; the belligerent parties were allowed to nurse and preserve their hostilities in private, while the negotiator did become, in fact an errand boy. Under those conditions those beginning sparks of friendlier relations sputtered and died out As for Ralph Bunche, black man, the author characterized him as one who neither soft-pedaled nor aggressively asserted his blackness. But he never forgot either his origins or the less fortunate of his people. He supported all movements to improve the lot of blacks and when Martin Luther King, in 1965, led his now historic march from Selma, to Montgomer-y, Ralph Bunche was in the vanguard of the marchers.

Miss Mann herself, as a citizen as well as an author, has made her own contribution to the improvement of race relations. With her husband and two children, some years ago she bought an old brownstone house in downtown Man-hanttan, intending to renovate it They hadn't realized it when they bought it but their house stood in a no-man's land between feuding blacks and Puerto Ri-cans. The white family, as white middle class families will do, tried raising flowers in boxes on their front doorstep, a practice which in that tense environment was inviting trouble cause "they wanted to see what it felt like to be taught by a woman." Since then, Dr. Horner feels, Harvard has made progress. Housing is co-residential The quota system for admitting women has been dropped.

There are now 50 women on the faculty. The percentage of women in Harvard Medical School has increased from 7-to-10 per cent a few years ago to about 30 per cent now. Dr. Horner doesn't think that the anxiety syndrome she found among women has disappeared, but she feels the women's movement "has brought things out into the open and made it possible to talk about some of these biases we have 'and try to control them." She also feels that the "domains of anxiety have changed." Women may not be as anxious about being rejected by a medical school, she said, but once they get there, they worry, "Will I get internships, will I be taken seriously?" The pressure of young men and women alike to choose a career so early can cause problems for them, Dr. Horner sail An undergraduate who concentrates all his studies on getting into med.