Carolina Alumni Review - March/April 2009

^TheBarefoot Shoemaker

Galahad Clark ’ 99 planned to stay out of the family business.
Now he’s making it fit into the idealism he brought
from Britain to Chapel Hill.

I

f you want to get to know Galahad Clark ’ 99, take a walk. But first, ditch your shoes and put on his, a pair of funky ultra-lightweight Vivo Barefoots, with super-flexible and super-thin punc-ture-resistant soles. (The Aqua style in green suede is particularly fetching.)

Then walk out your front door and down the steps and onto the sidewalk, and what-

ever you do, don’t avoid the twigs or leaves, the pebbles or cigarette

‘Shoes

butts or stray bits of litter, and no

are bad

matter your concern about

for you,

Mother’s back, most definitely do step on the cracks, and on the

shoes are bad

curb and manhole covers, and on

for the

pretty much any bumpy, cobbled, grated, raised surface that lies

world.’

before you, because it’s precisely
Galahad Clark
these cluttered, uneven steps that’ll
give you the urban foot massage
of your life.

by Christine Fundak Rohan

Don’t worry about tripping, or turning your ankle: Although you’ll probably feel shorter, you’ll feel remarkably more balanced because you’re only three millimeters off the ground and, with the way Clark’s shoe is built, your toes can spread out as much as they need to get you to the next step upright. It’ll take a few ambles like this to get your heels and feet muscles used to their new, unpadded movements — and they might object at first — but pretty soon you’ll notice how fluidly you move, with no stiff soles to restrict your foot’s movements, and how much of your prime perambulating life you’ve wasted, oblivious to the adventure on the ground.

When last we looked in on Galahad Clark, he was still studying as a Morehead Scholar, one of the beneficiaries of what is now known as the British Morehead-Cain Programme. Before he ever came to Chapel Hill, he had taken

an intense interest in educational opportunity in poverty-stricken Zimbabwe — extreme lack of, specifically. He and another Morehead, Jeff Pike ’ 98, founded a scholarship program known as Students 4 Students that enabled intelligent but economically disadvantaged Zimbabwean children to excel in an education system set up by their own government.

Maybe you remember Clarks Wallabees, the earthy, low-in-the-heels, high-in-the-toes shoe that helped herald the new self-consciousness that ambled in with the 1970s.

Same Clark. Britain’s biggest shoe retailer. Lancelot Clark created the Wallabee, and when his son came to Carolina intent on finding something good he could do for the world, he came as one who, in his words, “had every opportunity I ever desired.”