50 Things You Didn't Know About Converse Chuck Taylor All Stars

In an era when sneaker design is changed yearly, the concept of a design (with small changes) lasting for 96 years is unheard of. Most brands haven't lasted 96 years.

Basketball debuted as a medal sport in 1936. The American team played in Chucks, and won the first of seven consecutive gold medals.

The stars and stripes pair was produced in 1992, and a pair was donated to the Smithsonian, the nation's largest repository of its history.

Take that, Michael Jordan. Let's see how many pairs of Air Jordan 1s are produced in 2065.

The All Star 2000 would have been more or less unrecognizable to Chuck Taylor - who passed away in 1969. But the patch, he would have recognized that.

In 1935, Chuck Taylor invented the first stitchless basketball. We're kind of glad he didn't take that approach with Converse All-Stars.

Ending a streak of 63 wins and 7 straight gold medals, the US Olympic team took an L in 1972. But contrary to today's sports, they didn't blame the sneakers as an excuse. Converse still continued to provide basketball shoes for the US Olympic team in the years that followed.

They cost $3.95 back in 1957 and we all know what that led to.

The P.F. Flyers were the stars of the show, but plenty of kids in The Sandlot wore Chucks. One even had a lucky All-Star t-shirt.

It was 1939, what did you expect? Oregon beat Ohio State 46-33 in a game you probably wouldn't want to re-watch.

The good doctor may have had wild taste in most everything else, but his footwear choice was as basic as it got.

By the time Wilt Chamberlain made it to the NBA in 1959, there were other choices - PRO-Keds came about in 1949. But Wilt played in Chucks, and on March 2, 1962, he scored 100 points in them. Not bad.

Dennis was also prone to wearing striped shirts and had an unruly blonde mop - making him an improbable forerunner to Kurt Cobain.

We have not seen Tall Story. But seeing that it starred Anthony Perkins (Psycho) as a college basketball star and a 22-year-old Jane Fonda in her first role, it's time we did.

Converse began the Rubber Tracks program in 2011 as an effort to support the musicians that have sported Chuck Taylors over the years.

He did get a salary, and apparently was pretty good with an expense account. But considering the sheer number of pairs sold, maybe Chuck needed an agent.

One of the best barnstorming squads to ever do it, the Rens won the first-ever professional basketball championship in 1939, and once won 88 straight games in a single season. They did it all in Chucks.

This shouldn't come as a total surprise seeing what sort of market share Converse had in general, but man, on-court sneaker round ups in the '60s would have been boring.

He did play semi-pro ball with the Original Celtics and the Akron Firestones, but Chuck Taylor's playing days were over by the time the NBA was born in 1949. Wasn't much call for 48-year-old rookies - besides, by then he had a career.

Former major league baseball pitcher A.G. Spalding produced a basketball shoe before the All-Star. He also pioneered the use of the baseball glove - before him, most players played barehand.

Nike has a pretty good hold on things right now, but it's nothing compared to the lock Converse had in the '60s. Converse wasn't just interchangable with basketball sneakers, but with sneakers, period.

Maybe the Stones were just looking for sneakers that were older than they were. Twenty-five plus years later, both the Stones and Chucks are still going strong.

A sneaker just doesn't get more all-American than that.

No patents, no royalties, but Chuck Taylor did leave his mark on the shoe that bears his name. In fact, the ankle patch that actually bears his name was his idea.

Converse was kind of late on the uptake when it came to a lot of advances - no wonder, seeing they had the entire sneaker market on lock. We don't even want to imagine how much a pristine pair of suede '71s would go for now.

This is the simplest way to identify an All-Star that was produced before WWII. Converse has since brought back the all-black look, but that's all there was pre-'40s.

Marquis M. Converse founded his eponymous company to make winterized footwear. Canvas sneakers soon followed.

Incremental changes marked performance improvements as well as aesthetic ones. Keep in mind that the concept of a basketball shoe was virtually being invented on the fly.

Paul Peterson wore black highs as teenage son Jeff. The first hipster?

Those two extra eyelets on the medial side are the ancestors of more high-tech ventilation solutions - like the Ferrari-inspired intakes on the Air Jordan XIV.

Despite their stranglehold on the market in the '60s, by the '90s Converse was in trouble. Left behind in the move to "high-tech" basketball footwear, the company that re-invented the category was bankrupt by 2001. Purchased by Nike in 2003, Converse by then had all production shifted overseas.

What the heck took them so long?

Chuck Taylor never got his name on a patent connected to the All-Star, but he got his signature on the sneaker itself. Not bad for a salesman.

Obviously it's changed some - hence the new '70s style Chucks - but they look more or less the same now as they did when your grandfather wore them.

When you sell a pair every 43 seconds, the money adds up. The Chuck Taylor appeals to all sorts of demographics, and it shows in the bottom line.

Better grip, less slip. This is still part of the Converse Chuck Taylor All-Star design to this day.

It hadn't received the All-Star or Chuck Taylor name but in 1917, what we know as Chucks, featured groundbreaking new technology. Converse's new sneakers were the first to feature "non-skid" technology.

We're not entirely sure what Tree was thinking - by 1979 there were plenty of other choices, even from Converse. But once he put them aside, that was it. Gilbert Arenas said he would wear Chucks in a game, but he never did.

You can only evolve a vulcanized canvas shoe so far. And thankfully the basic Chuck is still canvas, not any kind of "advanced" material.

Once they figured out there was money to be made in more than just the basic colors - and that the canvas upper was as open to creativity as an artist's canvas - the floodgates opened.

Just in time for the heart of the hippie movement, Converse unveiled colored versions of the Chuck Taylor in 1971.

Until 1971, it was easy to pick Chucks. Either you got black or white, and high or low. Maybe there were some pros with their own colors, but the only way anyone else could get them was by dyeing them themselves.

And you thought elephant Print and Air bubbles were groundbreaking back in '88.

Oxford, in old-timey speak, means low-cut - Converse still uses "OX" today to refer to lows. Now you know.

Camo may be a mainstream thing today but back in the day it was almost exclusively for military use. In 1983, Converse created the first Camo Chucks and well, judging by recent releases, the colorway was a good idea.

The Converse All-Star as we know it today didn't emerge fully formed overnight. Each iteration took time. And if you wanted a pair of white Chucks before the 1936 Olympics, well, it wasn't happening.

A couple of the Ramones did wear Chucks, but that wasn't until later. They wound up influencing generations of bands to do something they didn't even do themselves. Now that's influential.

The Converse All-Stars traveled the country coached by a guy named Charles "Chuck" Taylor, who also played for the team and sold sneakers for the company.

Not bad for a pair of nearly hundred-year-old sneakers.