Almost 50 years ago, Dave Page — then a professor of American history at the University of Washington and Western Washington University — was bouldering with his girlfriend on a beach in California. They were sitting in the sand. He looked at his ragged rock shoe and said to her, ‘I gotta get these things resoled.’ “And it struck me as so stupid — that I’d have to send them to Colorado, to the only guy who could fix them, and it would take six months,” Page remembers. Not long before, he had spent a couple of months cutting hiking boot uppers at a small factory in Kitzbuhel, Austria, to scare up some cash for a climbing bender. So he took matters into his own hands: He paid a call to a shoe repairman in Seattle and started working for him, gratis. When the business closed every evening at six, Page had the shop to himself, destroying boots and putting them back together. Not long after, he hung his own shingle — from his Seattle basement. “Did I learn the trade from a mentor? No. He didn’t know shit,” he says. “I learned how to do it myself.”