The Cobblers Marks 65 Years in Hayward
The staff at The Cobblers shoe store on Foothill Boulevard in Hayward. Owner Rudy Grasseschi holds up the store's commemorative T-shirt in center, flanked by, from left, grandson Kenneth, "honorary son" Hector, grandson Wayne and son Dino. Not shown is son Rodney.
Hayward is cutting a ribbon in front of The Cobblers shoe store at 22443 Foothill Blvd. on Tuesday, June 13—but it’s to mark their 65 years in business there, not the opening of a new business.
Rudy Grasseschi and his family are in the third and fourth generation of running the store, which opened on Foothill Boulevard on June 13, 1958, in what was then a new retail development. It moved a few doors to a larger location in 1991.
Rudy’s dad Alfred had opened his first shoe store in Hayward in 1932 at the corner of B Street and Castro, which is now Mission Boulevard.
Rudy was the ninth of 11 children born to Alfred and Alina Grasseschi, who had both come from Santa Maria del Guidice, near Lucca in Italy. There was a detour to Montana to mine copper for a decade before moving to much warmer Hayward.
Rudy and his brothers worked at his parent’s shop after school and on weekends after it had moved across the street to what was then 619 Castro Street.
At one point, Hayward had 15 shoe stores and five shoe repair shops, Rudy said. When the store opened on Foothill, Hayward was booming and had recently added J.C. Penney’s, Capwell’s, and Woolworth’s, he added. All those are gone from downtown, although Penney's remains open across town at the Southland Mall.
Today, Rudy runs the store along with his sons Dino and Rodney and grandsons Kenneth and Wayne. They’re joined by master shoe repairer Hector, an “honorary son.”
Then-Assemblyman Bill Quirk recognized them as his assembly district's Small Business of the Year in 2018. The award recognized, along with the shoe store itself, its sponsorship of The Cobblers Car Show in Hayward for years. This was halted only by the pandemic but has been held only once since in the absence of its longtime organizer, Rudy said.
They saw a business drop during the pandemic when they cut down to being open half-days but kept everybody working and kept most of their customers.
“Our main business today is work shoes, both sales and repairs,” Rudy says.
The repair area at the front of the store keeps busy, and there's a steady stream of customers dropping off shoes to be repaired and picking them up afterward.
Each shoe has its own repair record, the elder Grasseschi said.
Rudy said that fewer people get regular shoes repaired these days.
“They buy them cheap, often on the Internet, and then just throw them out,” he said. “But when someone pays $200 or $300 for work shoes, they’ll repair those.”