Sometimes, Yohana Quiroz would ask her father — a skilled cobbler, who had been studying the craft since he was a child — why he repaired things for customers with such perfection and attention to detail. “This is the customer’s favorite bag,” Quiroz remembers him saying. “This is the customer’s favorite shoe. This is their favorite jacket. I need to fix it.”
Her father, Nicolas Torres, who expertly repaired the Mission’s shoes (and bags, and jackets, and who knows what else) for 33 years, died on Dec. 1, from liver cancer. He was 79.
“El Zapatero,” as his customers knew him, grew up in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. His upbringing was far from easy. His father was not around, and his mother abandoned him at a young age, leaving Torres to raise himself. He began repairing shoes as a child, and by the time he was 18 or so, he knew the ins and outs of the trade…