A white cowboy hat with sides curled up from wear lies on the floor next to him. With ease, he rolls past his hat and picks up a piece of cloth, smudged with black spots, in his fingers. Then he finds some cans in a bag.

All moves he’s made dozens of times. Then his concentration is broken.

“How are you doing?” someone says, with a tap on his back. He lifts his face, weathered with age, and pops out, “Fine. Fine. Fine.”

And why wouldn’t he be? This is Ike Clayton. He is 85, he has children that help take care of him now, he has the memories of a 63-year marriage to keep him company and he’s still doing what he loves — shining shoes.

Today, he takes a moment to show off the different of polish he has. Brown. White. Black. He can use all three.

“Some shoes look so good when you finish, you don’t want the man to come by and get them. You want people to come by and see how pretty they are,” he says, smiling wide. “That’s what I call ‘teasing’ work.”

Through the week, from 11:30 a.m. until 5:30 p.m. (or as long as he has work) Clayton can be found just inside the front door of Sullivan’s Metropolitan Grill, the restaurant inside the old Sullivan Hardware store in downtown Anderson.

But his story doesn’t begin here at this metal chair marked with spots of polish and padded with leather.

“I started at Walker’s Shoe Shop on South Fant Street,” Clayton says. “It was about 1937 or ‘38. It was 5 cents a shoeshine.”

Clayton is a native of this town, born at 426 Cleveland Ave. in 1923. He was born at a time when they had kerosene lamps, not electric lights. They didn’t have an ice box and “forget about a refrigerator.” They had to bathe in tin tubs. And roads were dirt covered with rock, not tar or gravel.

There were 10 children in his family. They were 12, but two of his sisters died before he even made it into the world.

Sickness nearly killed Clayton too, when he was a boy. It was the typhoid fever. That threatened him more than the chicken pox, the measles, the mumps or the “7-year-old” itch.

“I remember sleeping with onions in my pillow when I had the fever,” Clayton said. “A white lady from Georgia and the Lord saved me. Now they all gone. It’s just me and my baby sister. She’s 92.”

In those days, though, their daddy watched over them. Working at the printing shop during the week and in the pulpit on Sunday, Clayton’s daddy made sure his family had clothes and plenty of food on the table.

Now, Clayton can remember having a new “good suit” every two weeks and at Christmas time, receiving a red wagon.

“When my daddy was living, we lived like kings,” Clayton said. “Every day at dinner, he would have us some kind of candy. After we ate, everybody got candy. He worked at the printin’ shop and every day he’d come home with some peanuts. The littler you was the less you got, the bigger you was, the more you got.”

But Clayton’s world changed when he was 7. His daddy had a stroke in the pulpit and never regained consciousness. Four days later, Clayton’s daddy was gone.

“We all caught thunder,” Clayton said.

Their mom worked what she could. She found jobs at Orr mill. She was trying to raise the children and three grandchildren. With all those kids, one income wasn’t enough. As soon as Clayton was old enough to help their mama put food on the table, he went to work at a grocery store. He made 50 cents a week. And he’d give his mama 30 cents of that.

At 13, he learned he could make more money shining shoes — a nickel for each pair he shined. And that didn’t include the tips he could earn if he learned how to do the job really well.

He said he first worked He was working near Johnson’s Funeral Home at first. Then, he “got good enough to come to town.”

His first job in town was at Model Barber Shop on Main Street downtown. It was before World War II began, he remembers, helping him keep track of the dates. It was that job that earned him enough money to become the first black boy in town to buy a bike with a motor on it.

Later, he made enough to purchase two cars — a Model A Ford for the week and a V8 Ford for Sunday.

The prices went from 5 cents a shine, to 10 cents a shine “uptown” and then 30 cents a shine and now, Clayton charges $5 a shine.

But the real treasure he found while shining shoes was his wife, Mattie Francis Clayton. His eyes sparkle when he talks about her.

“I had a hard time getting that girl to marry me. I’d take her to the movies when I got off work,” Clayton said. “I was sharp looking back then. But she wasn’t a fast girl. She had old fashioned ways. She wasn’t fast. And I’m glad. She lived for the Lord.”

“I messed around and fell in love with that girl. She turned me down two or three times.”

How did you finally marry her?

“I begged her,” Clayton says, letting out a laugh. “She finally gave in. We were married 63 years.”

With her at his side, Clayton worked at Model Barber Shop until the 1950s. The mill, one on Anderson’s eastside, and its promise of 68 cents an hour lured him away from the chair and the polish. He stayed there 20 years, he said. He was there when President John F. Kennedy was shot. And he learned a “good trade” down there.

He was done with his shining days. But then two years ago, he lost Mattie Francis. And an old friend of his — one he knew when he worked at Model Barber Shop — talked him into picking up his polish bag again.

So now inside Sullivan’s Hardware store, he sits at his chair and he’s doing, “fine, fine, fine.”