It's hard to do your best thinking when your feet hurt. That's true even for geniuses. On a crisp fall morning back in 1952, Peter Hulit was tending to business at his shoe store on Nassau Street--the venerable main drag of Princeton, N.J.--when he got an emergency call. Helen Dukas, Albert Einstein's secretary-housekeeper, was on the line. Could Hulit come to the physicist's home? "Dr. Einstein's shoes are hurting him," Dukas said. Recalls Hulit: "I'd never made a house call before or since. But this was Einstein."
Hulit, who is now 82, a D-day survivor and long retired, was used to extraordinary customers, including the father of relativity. Hulit's recollections come in the 50th-anniversary year of Einstein's death, an occasion for many reminiscences around Princeton.
Einstein was a familiar figure in town, often dressed in baggy khakis and sweat shirts, his omnipresent pipe creating a halo of smoke around his unkempt hair. Hulit's Shoe Store, a family business begun in 1929, was--and remains--a fixture for residents, and for the students and faculty of Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study. The academics bought their desert boots and penny loafers there, and when Princeton's many Nobel prizewinners over the years needed patent-leather shoes for the ceremony in Stockholm, they visited Hulit's too. Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was known to browse through the Florsheims.
Setting off for 112 Mercer Street, some five blocks away, where Einstein lived, Hulit took with him a foot measurer and a few pairs of shoes. Dukas admitted the shoe man to the foyer of the smallish two-story house. "Suddenly," says Hulit, "Einstein came down the stairs, smoking his pipe. He shook hands and then reached into his back pocket, pulled out a folded piece of paper and said, 'Zis is ze problem.'"
A good scientific investigator, Einstein, who walked the mile to and from his office at the Institute for Advanced Study every day, had attempted to figure out his discomfort. He had drawn two sketches of shoes (see diagram), showing the pattern of foot pressure. The one he had labeled "bad" showed his current problem: the pressure on his feet was concentrated on the outside of his foot and on his big toe. The drawing labeled "good" showed what he thought to be the ideal: pressure evenly distributed over the entire foot.
"Einstein had the right idea," says Hulit. "But he was very hard to fit. He wore old slippers or sneakers much of the time. Mostly he went barefoot. His feet were as soft and smooth as a baby's." After measuring, Hulit concluded that the professor just needed bigger shoes.
Hulit fitted Einstein with black dress shoes that were comfortable. The pleased professor thanked Hulit profusely, signed his name to his shoe drawings and gave the paper to Hulit. The paper still hangs in Hulit's home. Being a proper Princetonian, Hulit gave Einstein shoes that were appropriate for a public appearance. "The man had never had a pair of black shoes in his life," recalls Hulit. "But I knew he was due to appear at an event in New York City pretty soon. I wasn't going to let him go in brown shoes or sneakers. Even if he was Albert Einstein."