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What people say makes us excited::
MONTGOMERY - They're roaming all over the lower grades at Trinity Presbyterian School, little barefoot children. Toes smack the linoleum floors. Heels hit carpet.
In music class, in the computer lab, in kindergarten circled around their teacher as she reads aloud about the wonders of the letter A.
Poor kids, it's 40 degrees outside and raining.
Poor, hardly.
Trinity, a private school in East Montgomery with tuition of $7,000 a year, allows children in kindergarten through third grade to go barefoot. All year, rain or shine.
The late Montgomery pediatrician Dr. Robert Parker promoted the practice in the 1940s and'50s as a way for children to avoid sickness, and it's survived through generations.
"I'm the one he experimented on," said Bob Parker, 64, the pediatrician's son and a retired veterinarian who lives in Millbrook. "I went barefoot, and I can honestly say I never had a cold."
His father's theory was that mothers bundled their children up too much in cold weather. The children would sweat, and that made them sick.
During the fall and spring, more than half of the Trinity youngsters go barefoot. In the winter, it drops to about a third, said Headmaster Brian Willett.
Trinity, with an enrollment of 972, adopted uniforms three years ago. The pupils wear variations of khaki, navy, red and white. Sneakers for the older children must be solid white, none of those $150 metallic jobs. But the barefoot rule survived the strict overhaul.
"One of the first things that parents asked, `Is the policy going to change about going barefoot?'" Willett said.
Even Wednesday, one of the most miserable days of the season with temperatures below 45 and a constant drizzle, several children in each class were following Dr. Parker's advice.
While the tradition survives, the reasons behind it appear lost on this crowd.
Pick your reason:
"I really don't want to get blisters," said Abby Franklin, a barefoot kindergartner with a smudge of lavender polish on each toenail.
Cole Brown, a small boy with a fringe of brown hair, has a different set of issues with footwear. "When you wear shoes, first you have to get somebody to tie them."
Elsewhere in Montgomery, it's not uncommon for youngsters to attend church shoeless. "When my daughter was growing up, she went barefoot until about the third or fourth grade," said Sharon Self, music minister at First Baptist Church downtown.
Residents say the older, well-established Protestant churches have the most bare feet in Sunday school. What used to be a sign of poverty is now a mark of privilege. Mothers will spend hundreds of dollars on a hand-smocked dress, then bypass the patent leather Mary Janes.
"They look at them and say, `There's a Dr. Parker baby,'" said Alice Berry, Parker's daughter.
A tenderfoot now:
Until her father retired in 1975, even children in public schools went barefoot, on his advice.
"Back then, you could do anything you wanted to do," said Berry, who still lives in Montgomery and still goes shoeless often, though not in public. "My feet are too tender."
In the heyday of bare feet, her brother was a crossing guard for Cloverdale Elementary School. He stopped traffic barefoot, prompting strangers to ask if the poor little child needed shoes, Berry recalled.
Bob Parker said he once went 700 days barefoot. "You talking about feet getting tough," he said. "My big fun was I could sit there and get thumbtacks and stick them in my feet." This was preferably done with an audience of properly disgusted girls.
`Never get sick':
Trinity's campus contains several buildings connected by concrete stairs and covered walkways. Layne Williams, a third-grader in long pants, red turtleneck and navy fleece jacket, nonchalantly walks barefoot on wet concrete to music class. Otherwise dressed for winter, Layne looks like a child who forgot something.
She is not looking forward to fourth grade's shoes rule. "It's going to be hard," she said.
Her teacher, Jane Harrington, has been watching this trend 20 years, and was skeptical at first. Not anymore. "Those kids never get sick," she said.
Walking through the lunchroom can get a little dicey, according to a group of third-grade girls at a lunch table.
"She stepped in chewed-up pizza once," Mori Wallace said, pointing to a classmate.
One stepped in ketchup once.
All in all, they said, the freedom and comfort of going barefoot outweigh the perils and the hassles of tying shoelaces.
Skepticism:
Homewood pediatrician Dr. Tommy Amason was a patient of Dr. Parker's in the 1940s. He wore shoes to church and school, but otherwise grew up barefoot.
Amason, however, does not advise his patients against shoes.
"I've always laughed about the barefooted deal," Amason said. "He felt like it was a boost to the immune system. ... if you keep exposing these children and their bare feet to all the elements, it will toughen their immune system."
But Amason and a partner in the Mayfair Medical Group, Dr. Richard Huie, don't recommend it.
"I don't think there's any health advantage to going barefoot, in the winter, specifically," Huie said.
And in the summertime, there's a risk of parasitic infections entering through the feet, he said.
However, both pediatricians said they know that Parker was revered and an excellent doctor.
"Everything else he told the parents must have been so absolutely wonderful. Why else would they follow this idiot routine of going barefoot?" Amason said.
His wife works in the portrait business. She's told him that in fancy, ornate portraits from south Alabama, the richly dressed children usually lack shoes. "If it's a barefoot child, you know it's from Montgomery."
E-mail: ccrowder@bhamnews.com
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