Paul Sassone

Would my feet glow in the dark?

I hurried into the bedroom, shut the door, switched off the light and pulled off my shoes and socks.

Whew! My feet did not glow in the dark.

A few weeks before, I had seen a movie on TV in which kindly scientist Boris Karloff had been exposed to too much radiation, which turned him into killer Karloff. The physical manifestation of this transformation was that Karloff’s hands and face glowed in the dark. I didn’t know about his feet since he kept his shoes on the entire movie.

I was checking my feet since that very day I too had been exposed to radiation. My mom and dad took my brother and me to a nearby shoe store to buy back-to- school shoes.

This store didn’t measure your feet with that ruler kind of thing. No, this store was modern and up to date. This store used a fluoroscope.

A fluoroscope was a wood or metal cabinet 4 to 5 feet high containing an X-ray tube and a lead-shield base, above which was a platform on which the customer (me) placed his feet.

The sales clerk turned on the machine. This sent a beam of X-rays up through the feet and an image was projected onto a fluorescent screen on top of the machine. There were three binocular-shaped eyepieces on top — one for the customer (me), one for the sales clerk and one for the customer’s mom.

I was enchanted. I giggled and jiggled my toes and watched my toe bones jiggle back up at me. While I was thus enjoying myself the sales clerk and my mom were checking whether my toes had enough room in the shoes.

Once my initial Karloff concern was resolved (no glowing feet) I insisted we shoe shop only at the store with the fluoroscope. Like all kids of the 1950s I loved anything science and science fiction. Each Saturday would find me at a matinee of science fiction movies — “The Thing,” “Them,” “Earth Versus the Flying Saucers,” “It Came From Outer Space.” and plenty more.

Why not sci-fi shoe shopping?

Though invented in the 1920s, the 1950s was the heyday of the fluoroscope. During the 1950s it is estimated there were 10,000 fluoroscopes in shoe stores throughout the United States, 3,000 in the United Kingdom and 1,000 in Canada.

There always had been some concern about shoe clerks zapping people’s feet with radiation. For instance, a 1948 survey of 200 fluoroscopes in Detroit found that 43 were capable of giving excessive doses of radiation.

Limited exposure to X-rays from a fluoroscope were not overtly hazardous — a shoe fitting exposed the recipient to radiation three times less than a chest X-ray if the machine was in perfect working order.

But sometimes fluoroscopes leaked. And sometimes sales clerks removed the lead shielding to make the fluoroscope easier to move. But generally speaking, repeated exposure was the danger. And that danger was most common for the shoe sales clerks who not only used the machine time after time, but also would place his or her hands directly in the X-ray beam to adjust foot placement.

An article in the Wisconsin Medical Journal reported the case of a woman who, with her husband, owned a shoe store for 50 years. For at least seven of those years the store used a fluoroscope.  She developed a cancer on the sole of her foot.

How many other cancers did the fluoroscope cause? Who can say? But in 1957 the first state banned fluoroscopes. By the 1970s, fluoroscopes were banned in 33 states. And now they are extinct.

It’s hard to believe there actually was a time when totally untrained people could zap us with radiation.

Is it a coincidence that the fluoroscope was most popular during the 1950s, the decade of science fiction films?

Even shopping in the 1950s was a science fiction adventure. But — unlike poor Boris Karloff — I came through unscathed.

My feet do not glow in the dark. And — to the best of my knowledge — neither do my brother’s.