Culprit: Litterbug or lazy philanthropist
Nashville's own Soles4Souls, a non-profit that provides footwear to the impoverished in the U.S. and around the world, stumbled onto the mother-lode Friday: Thousands of perfectly good shoes scattered along Miami's Palmetto Expressway and stacking traffic for miles.
"I saw this on the news and I called and said, 'Why don't we pick these shoes up?'"said Wayne Elsey, CEO of Soles4Souls. "The last thing I wanted was for these to go to a landfill."
Coincidentally, Corrections Corporation of America, which is headquartered in Brentwood, supplied the muscle to gather the shoes strewn all over multiple lanes of traffic. The shoes—comprised of athletic shoes, sandals, skates and winter boots—are now destined for Alabama to be cleaned, then on to hurricane-wracked Haiti.
For Elsey, the spectacle of thousands of shoes was a Godsend. "We get a lot of exposure, but this has been pretty dramatic," said Elsey, who'll be on CNN tonight. "Some of them were brand new. Some had the tags still on them. Some were used."
Though a commuting catastrophe—think of a 16-year-old girl's closet exploding all over one of South Florida's busiest highways—SoFla driver's can look at the bright side: Given the melting pot nature of Miami, those shoes might end up on your cousin's foot.
