When Eddie Davis started shining shoes as an 8-year-old in Laurel, Miss., he’d earn a nickel from every dime shoeshine. It was 1922, a time when jobs were scarce for kids growing up poor and black in the segregated South. Even so, it wasn’t unusual for Davis to take home as much as $6 a day to help support his mother and two siblings, keeping only 50 cents a week for himself. Laurel was a one-industry town, and sawmill jobs paid about $15 a week, and industrious young Davis was making more than most grownups.

He’d have to have shined something like 120 pairs of shoes a day to earn that much, a herculean feat even for a hard-working kid like Davis. “That was with tips,” he explains, sitting 84 years later in his small shoeshine shop on the skywalk level of the Keck City Center. He reopened the stand – along with the Coney Island restaurant next door, one of the first skywalk businesses in the 1970s – a few months ago. The first time around, he ran it for about nine years until his wife was diagnosed with cancer, and then it continued under a handful of owners, but none was able to replicate Davis’ success.

Davis moved north to the Des Moines area in 1939 and set up a stand in the old Truman Shoe Shop at 618 Grand Ave.. Truman’s was next to the Liberty Building, a busy high-rise office building at 410 Sixth Ave., and Davis’ business thrived. He “took care,” as he refers to his trade, of men’s shoes at the Wakonda Club for a time and then at Des Moines Golf and Country Club, where he also was the manager of the men’s locker room, an inner sanctum that made him privy to secrets, shared confidences and other intimate details about the lives of the club’s members that he’ll take to his grave. In the shoeshine business, keeping clients’ confidences is as important as buffing their footwear to a high gloss.

The business’s heyday was at a time when canvas tennis shoes never carried an executive into the office and before shoes were crafted out of materials that don’t take a shine. Back then, a good shine meant everything. And, though shoeshine stands like his have largely gone the way of the downtown department stores, lunch counters and other vanishing traditions (there are believed to be fewer than 5,000 professional shoe shiners remaining in the country), a well-maintained pair of shoes still matters in Davis’ mind.

“A man can have on a $1,000 suit of clothes and a bad-looking pair of shoes, and he is not dressed well,” says Davis, who’s dressed in a satin shirt, cuffed trousers and a well-shined pair of wingtips. “But he can put on a nice-looking pair of shined shoes with coveralls and overalls. People will look at your feet before they look at your clothes.”

By rights, Davis ought to be retired at age 92. He didn’t like seeing the shoeshine shop closed and, he says, “I need this to keep me alive. I have to be busy.”

Besides, Davis tried retirement once, about 45 years ago when he left his job at Des Moines Golf and Country Club. It didn’t stick. He took up preaching when he was in his early 50s, and his sermons at the Church of God in Christ, a Pentecostal domination, stirred in parishioners a passion for helping neighbors who were hungry, jobless, homeless or otherwise living desperately close to the edge. His legacy of gathering food items at Christmastime and distributing them to people he knew needed, but hadn’t asked for, help continues at the namesake Eddie Davis Community Center, a no-questions-asked social services center in Valley Junction.

Saving “soles” with a fresh shine may have been Davis’ vocation, but saving “souls” through his street – or, in this case, skywalk – ministry is his avocation. He doesn’t proselytize, but when a woman whose job had been eliminated pops into the small space to let him know she’d found work, he responds with a broad smile and wink, “We prayed for that, didn’t we?” A few minutes pass and he’s offering encouragement to another of his skywalk friends who’s still favoring one leg after a recent illness. He’s got some loyal customers – among them, businessmen Mel Harper and Dwayne McAninch, his partners in the Valley Junction food drives – but he also caters to a growing number of young professionals, men and women, who recognize the value of a good shoeshine.

Traffic to his shop, a charming mix of both a fading craft and street-corner philosophy, isn’t as brisk as it was when he started shining shoes, though Davis is ready with a brush in his hand most weekdays between 8 in the morning to mid- to late afternoon. The tips that allowed his family to live in relative prosperity in the South are still coming in, $5 here, a couple of bucks there.

Some, slipping him an extra fiver for a $5 shine, smile and wink knowingly before speaking a truth that is universal among all who know the Rev. Eddie Davis: “You’ll just give it away,” they say.