Introduction
THOMAS HOMAN was born in England around 1871. He came to America in 1885, and by 1892 was a naturalized American citizen.
In the early 1900s Thomas Homan lived at 129 Main Street. His neighbor at 125 was Daniel D. McConnell, who ran an oyster restaurant there. His son, Daniel P. McConnell, would have a long and distinguished career as a journalist in Camden. Homan gave the then ten-year-old McConnell, who had left school, his first job, in his cobbler shop. He encouraged the youngster to continue reading and writing, which young McConnell did to the point of becoming a professional writer. Thomas Homan was somewhat less successful in teaching his young charge to play the cornet.
By the time of the 1920 census Thomas Homan owned a home at 526 North 2nd Street in Camden. For many years he operated a shoe repair shop at North 2nd and Elm Street. He also made shoes, an art common then but lost in today’s mass manufactured world. This shop was around the corner from Dr. Howard Palm, and a short walk from John Daly’s bar, at 201 Vine Street. Thomas Homan was then married, and with wife Ada had three sons, George F., Thomas R., and William W. Homan. William W. Homan graduated from Camden High School in 1926.
In January of 1938, noted journalist Gordon Mackay wrote a column about Tom Homan, writing about his shoe shop, his hobby of building model ships, and his activity as a tuba player with the Shriner’s Lulu Temple band in Philadelphia.
By the time the 1947 Camden City Directory was published the Homan family had left Camden.
Is Zat So!
Camden Courier-Post —
GENIUS blooms in many strange places in Camden. Take a walk to Second and Elm streets some idle moment and keep your eyes peeled for a huge boot that stands as a business sign. It is one of the few boots seen nowadays to advertise a shoemaker, cobbler, cordwainer, or any other plain and fancy name you dub men who make shoes.
When I was a kid and my own old man sat at a bench to hammer the brads into a half sole job, every shoemaker had such a boot stuck right out in front of his place of business. Time, neon lights and some of the other flashy agenda of commerce have put the old shoes in their place, so to see one good staunch old-timer who still has that boot standing out front is to race back to boyhood.
The gentleman who believes in signs is Tom Holman. He is 66, and has resided around Second and Elm streets for the past 45 years. Tom is as much a fixture and institution in that neighborhood as the Delaware River, and much more sociable to meet.
Dickens would have liked to greet Tom, or browse through his cobblery. He would have found it indeed an “Old Curiosity Shop,” filled with treasures such as only Tom Holman would collect in his years in Camden.
It was 52 years ago that a youngster born in London sailed for these shores on the “Lord Clive.” His uncle had settled in Camden, so Tom came here. He has remained ever since. Tommy had been apprenticed to a shoemaker and had passed to become a “shooie,” as they term the cobbler in Dear Ole Lunnon.
Youngster Had Passion for Sea
This youngster had a passion for the sea. Whether it was a kickback to some old ancestor, Tom doesn’t know, but his inordinate love for the sea exists even today. You’ll discover that, too, when you see his ship models, one a cutter, the other a schooner. They cover about one-half the space in this shoe repairing place at Second and Elm streets.
So excessive was the ardor that the young man felt for the bounding main and the life on the ocean wave, that when he was 18 he couldn’t repress the yearning. Then Tom did the obvious thing that all youths did in our day when they wanted to make a pilgrimage to Britain. He shipped on a cattle boat.
Such life wasn’t too onerous and it smacked of adventure. A little dirtier, perhaps, than dawdling about a studio, but packed with adventure, the smell of the sea and lowing of the kine. It wasn’t such tough work as described by some of the young men who became writers after shooting over the Atlantic Ocean in a cattle boat.
You watered the stock in the morning, gave the steers cracked wheat at noon, tossed them hay for supper. Tommy came back to Camden only to become possessed of another urge. This time he remained on dry land and became an addict to the bicycle.
Tom was a high class young pilgrim on those wheels which we youngsters called “safeties.” Tom’s first wheel had solid tires. He rode to the Delaware Water Gap in Pennsylvania and back one Sunday, 186 miles or better. When Tom returned he was so stiff in the joints and other spots that he could hardly walk, but he still was a firm and fast adherent to the bicycle.
Worked Five Years on Model
You’ll appreciate the classic lines and grand beauty of those ship models, which Tom races in Haddonfield and other suburbs where a body of water and a breeze brisk enough blows to sail his craft. The coop required four years to build, the schooner five years—tasks which could be performed only between slaps at the pegs for the half soles. The models are things of permanent beauty. To get one from Tom would require perhaps more suasion and spondulix than I can afford. I’ll tell the cock-eyed world. But the ship models are not the only things to be found in this “Old Curiosity Shop.”
On the floor will be found musical instruments, fearfully and wonderfully made. They’re called tubas, and should be played only by elephants. One of them is a delicate piece of brass that only weighs 35 pounds while its kid sister weighs around 23 pounds.
“I rarely play the bigger one,” Tom confided to me, “but use the littler one whenever I have to play in the band for the parades of Lu Lu Temple. You know, the Shriners of Philadelphia.”
Tom has a gallery galore of photographs of the Lu Lu Temple Band parading hither and yon. There is Tom, who doesn’t appear to outweigh the bigger tuba, umphing along like a drum major. A sheet of music rests beside the bigger tuba in the store. Holman admits the soft impeachment that he tootles the tuba when business becomes a mite slack.
He confessed one musical crime to me, which he said he wouldn’t mind seeing in print if the victim didn’t object. As the latter concurred in the idea, let it be stated that Tom committed the major felony of trying to teach Dan McConnell of the Courier Post staff to play the cornet.
“Dan was a nice young fellow,” said Tom. “He worked for me when he was only about 10. He wanted to play the cornet, so I taught him. There was a woman upstairs who complained about Dan’s music. Dan finally had to sneak away and practice in one of the freight cars that stood on the railroad siding here.
“I guess when you tell Dan how rotten he was as a cornetist, he’ll probably tell you about the time I built a nice boat to sail on the Delaware—everybody owned a boat to sail on the river in those days. When I built her out in the yard she was so big I couldn’t get her out. I had to use a derrick.”
“But you tell Dan that as a cornetist he’s a good shoe salesman and let it go at that.”
In the window as you reach the door stands a pair of big seaboots, an advertisement for shoe repairing.
A sailor came in here one day, said Holman, “and said to me: ‘I found this pair of boots 40 years ago in the hold of a German vessel. Take ‘em and use ‘em as a sign for your window.’ That was 15 years ago. They have remained there ever since.”
That’s Tom Holman, steadfast to the old customs.