Wooden Shoes Story - Written by Uncle Bill as part of his report about the 1993 Luken Reunion

For door prizes we had a pair of wooden shoes and two boxes of Esther Price candy. Maybe next year we will have more. Did you know that grandfather August Luken made wooden shoes. In the dead of winter he would take one of his sons and they loaded packframes with their tools and blocks of fresh cut willow wood and go to the neighbor families. They would live with the family until they carved a new set of wooden shoes for the entire family. The wooden shoes were then stored behind the kitchen stove to dry out. By summer, they were as hard as a rock. Not much money changed hands, but it was a social event to break up the long, cold northern German winters.