The name of their store—Armenia Mountain Footwear—seems to say it all. They sell shoes, right?

Indeed they do. But the sight of co-owner Kirt Casler with a needle and leather thread in hand, stitching a boy’s baseball glove, suggests this is no ordinary shoe store. The boy has a big game coming up and his glove “needs some repair,” explains Kirt, who points out the frayed seams. “The family asked if we could fix it and we said yes.”

Kirt’s father-in-law takes a puff on his corncob pipe and leans back at his workbench.

“Yeah,” says Jack Kuyper, eighty-six. “We shouldn’t, but we do everything.”

Yes, Armenia Mountain Footwear is also an old-fashioned, family-run cobbler shop. It repairs and replaces heels and soles, tongues and bootstraps, and can keep a good pair of shoes or boots going for years.

But Armenia Mountain’s “everything” takes shoe repair to still another level. The two generations who run the store out of a grand white house on Canton Street in Troy are what’s known as pedorthists, or orthopedic shoemakers. A dwindling breed, they modify and reshape footwear for customers whose feet—and hence their shoes—need special attention. The smiling public face of this side of the “everything” is Jen Casler, Jack’s daughter and Kirt’s wife, who learned the pedorthist trade at her father’s side.

“Dad wanted to help people with their foot problems,” explains Jen, fifty-nine. “But he couldn’t afford to go to the school in Chicago that taught [pedorthics], so he studied out of books.” Here she pulls three books from a shelf: Contemporary Pedorthics, The Human Foot, and Professional Shoe Fitting.

Jack founded the store in 1972 after a decade building and selling log homes. Jen and Kirt bought the business from her parents in 2001.

“Then I got demoted,” Jack says with a laugh. “I used to be the shoe man. Now I’m the glue man.” A devoted trout fisherman, he still works at the shop two days a week. With his white hair, that corncob pipe, and a long leather apron, he looks like a cobbler out of central casting.

He lifts up a gray-green boot. It looks like any out-of-the-box boot until he points out a three-inch thick layer of black rubber running full length above the heel and sole. It’s for a man with one leg shorter than the other who “injured it in a motorcycle accident.” Jen then points out a pair of beige, nearly round, thick-soled shoes. Kirt modified them for a customer with profound diabetic neuropathy, and Jen added arch supports and interior padding.

A few minutes later she’s demonstrating how the “skiver” and “five-in-one cutter” work—both machines are nearly a century old—when Kirt lets her know that “Denny’s here.”

She heads out to their capacious fitting room, where dozens of hiking boots, cowboy boots, dress shoes, and walking shoes line the shelves. (Most of the product line qualifies as “sensible.”) Denny Boyd, seventy-five, looks up from a long, pew-style bench and gives her a big smile. Jen greets him warmly and hugs Denny’s wife, Vicky. As Jen seats herself on a low fitting stool, Vicky explains that in 2009 Denny, a truck driver, had a “paralyzing stroke” on his left side so profound that doctors told her he would “never get out of bed—and never know me.”

And yet Denny not only recovered his speech and mobility, he chops wood and walks regularly from their home in Leroy to Sunfish Pond atop Barclay Mountain, a four-mile loop. But his left foot lost size with the stroke, and so today he’ll need extra padding and lifts to make the left half of his pair of new Carolina hiking boots fit properly.

Jen asks if the left foot is giving him any pain. He says no, and she measures both feet with a tape measure.

“Jen has helped him so much,” says Vicky. “They know more about his feet than I do.”

Armed with his measurements, Jen heads back to the workroom and twists the knob on a giant Rolodex. “Our Amish computer,” she jokes. “Look. I have a card on him.” Sure enough, it shows Denny bought his first footwear here in 1987, and that they added a “diabetic heel lift” to it for extra cushion. The card also notes that Denny likes only one extra pad on the tongue of his shoes, so to “snug up” his new left boot Jen must also add padding to the sole. She removes the full-length arch support that comes with the boot, traces it on a rectangle of eighth-inch-thick crepe, and cuts it out. Next she runs its through a machine that feathers or skives its perimeter so that it lies snugly inside the boot.

She emerges with the modified footwear, puts it on Denny, and tightens the laces.

“It’s still slipping,” he says.

“Not a problem,” says Jen, who takes it back to the workroom, pulls out the crepe, and replaces it with a sixteenth-inch-thick liner of cork. He tries it out but shakes his head and asks her to tighten the laces.

“All right,” she says with a laugh. “I’m going to do it with all my might.”

Again he takes them for a spin but thinks the left is still slipping.

“How about you try them for a few days?” she asks. He agrees, and he wears them to the checkout counter. Jack comes out to greet them, and they chat.

“We’ll see you in a week if we need to,” Denny tells Jen, and they head out the door.

“It might take two times and it might take ten,” says Jen as she restores Denny’s updated card to the Rolodex. “But that’s the only way to do it.”