HACKENSACK, N.J. — Cameron I. Anderson of Allendale, N.J., who helped develop the Foot Locker athletic shoe chain while an executive with the Kinney Shoe Corp., died Saturday. He was 85.
As a teenager, Anderson sold shoes in the Kinney store his father managed in Wausau, Wis. To his parents’ consternation, he left the University of Minnesota a month before graduation to manage his own Kinney store in Madison, Wis., said June Anderson, his wife of 60 years.
“He grew up with shoes,” she said. “They were his life’s work.”
Anderson spent 45 years with Kinney, once the nation’s largest full-service family shoe retailer. He was promoted to president in 1979 and retired as president and CEO in 1989.
He was instrumental in launching Kinney’s Foot Locker subsidiary in 1974. While the Kinney name has disappeared from the retail scene, Foot Locker today has 1,911 stores in 21 countries, including 1,171 in the United States.
Anderson proved himself a seer in 1985 when The New York Times asked about trends in athletic footwear. “Just supply enough Air Jordans,” he said, referring to the Nike brand endorsed by Michael Jordan, then a Chicago Bulls rookie. “It’s going to be one of the biggies.”
A onetime member of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, Anderson practiced what he preached. Until last year, when he learned he had lymphoma, he walked two miles a day at a local health club. Asked what her husband wore on his feet, June Anderson said, “Nikes or Reeboks or whatever. He knew his shoes.”
Anderson made international headlines in 1990 — and it had nothing to do with Nikes or Reeboks.
He went to Germany to hand-deliver a 14th-century sheepskin manuscript to its rightful owner, Baron Helmut Haller von Hallerstein. Anderson, a soldier during World War II, came into the manuscript’s possession at the castle of Grossgrundlach, near Nuremburg, in the war’s closing days. The document, which described a dispute over land and timber rights, had hung on the wall of his New Jer sey home.
Anderson decided to look into the document’s history after reading about the unrelated theft of Germany’s Quedlinburg treasures. He sent a copy of the manuscript to the curator of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City.
“I thought it was a nice souvenir from the war,” he told The Record. “As it turned out, the document proved to be quite interesting.”
He added, laughing: “I knew I would return it, because I did not want the West German police pulling up in front of my house in a black Mercedes to take me away.”
Anderson, a 45-year resident of Allendale, is survived by his wife; his children, Marilyn Bristow of Frankfort, Ill., James C. Anderson of Allendale and Robert M. Anderson of Mahwah, N.J.; a sister; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.