Officially, Joe Salzano hung up his shoe industry spikes eight years ago following a Hall of Fame career in retail sales and training. Now he’s most likely to be found wearing spikes for senior league, high arc softball as a catcher/manager for one team and manager for another, both in Massachusetts. That’s two games a week and plenty of practices for a good chunk of the year, plus competing in tournaments around the country—at age 87, no less! And as everyone who knows Salzano can attest, he plays to win. The Charlie Hustle of shoes is scoring as much success on the diamond as he did in his shoe industry career, winning more than 50 tournament championships and hundreds of games to date, including a 37-game winning streak last season.
“Senior softball is my life now,” says Salzano as he preps for another season doing regular walks of a couple of miles around his neighborhood and hitting the gym often. “It’s been good for me because it has some resemblance to my former job in that I take it very seriously, I do lots of preparation, and I play hard. Senior softball has given me another way to keep active.”
Salzano says it was difficult to walk away from an industry he dearly loved for 59 years. He began his career at Altier’s Shoes in Rochester, NY, then followed coworker Bob Infantino to Rockport, and later served as Vice President of Sales at Clarks, where he rose to industry fame. Salzano missed only one day of work in that entire six-decade stretch, due to food poisoning in Missouri. He was the Cal Ripken of shoes, even though this diehard New York Yankees fan might bristle at the Orioles reference. Indeed, Salzano’s passion for his job and the industry was unparalleled. His speaking tours to motivate and educate store staffs throughout North America are the stuff of Shoe Dog legend. Some of his memorable sayings include: “Now is the time”; “The more you show and tell, the more you sell”; and “If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.”
“It was very difficult to retire, but I decided I’d had enough. I could sit back and say, ‘Wow, I was lucky,’” Salzano says. “For a person who barely had a high school education, I had a pretty great career in the shoe business, and I enjoyed it all immensely. I’m not disappointed by anything.”
Salzano misses the biz—the energy, excitement, and thrill of sales. Most of all, as the consummate salesperson, he misses the people. “I always urged people to enjoy what they were doing, because if you don’t like what you’re doing, you’re not going to do well,” he says. “And I never felt like my career was work. It was just so much fun to travel around the country and see all these great stores and engage with their staffs.”
What is his shoe legacy? “I got people motivated. I got them excited about doing their jobs, and they got better at their jobs,” says Salzano. It was a win-win: Stores sold more shoes overall and Clarks, in particular, flourished. “People who attended my presentations wanted to be entertained, but they also wanted to learn something they could take back to their stores to become better at their jobs,” Salzano adds. “That was my mission—to give people self-motivation that would stick.”
When Salzano is not on the ballfield these days, he can often be found playing his saxophone. Until recently, he played regularly in clubs in downtown Boston during the summers. But, after battling prostate cancer the past couple of years, he’s dialed it back and now plays at local senior homes on occasion for free. “They love it,” Salzano says, noting that he aims to practice every day for at least a half hour. “In my retirement I’ve tried to emulate everything I did in the shoe business: Stay active and engaged, try to get better, and be as positive as possible,” he says. “If you think you’re too old, that’ll put you below ground. I’d rather stay above ground playing ball and my horn. It’s working for me.”
