FIRST DAYS OF SNOW, BE PREPARED

The first day of snow bringing my LL Bean duck boots out of the closet. These boots have along history, as an outdoorsman first and businessman second, L.L. Bean had returned from too many hunting trips with cold, wet, chafed feet. He wanted a comfortable boot that would stand up to the elements. As he would find out, he wasn’t alone. When he got a bright idea. “I was quite interested in getting the right kind of footwear for deer hunting,” he would write decades later in his autobiography, My Story: The Autobiography of a Down-East Merchant. “I took a pair of shoe rubbers from the stock on the shelves and had a shoe maker cut out a pair of 7 1/2 inch tops. The local cobbler stitched the whole thing together.” Thus, the Maine Hunting Shoe was born.