BAREFOOTIN'.(Mike Wallace on his retirement from 60 Minutes)(Interview)

This spring, Mike Wallace's retirement from "60 Minutes" was marked by a spate of tributes, which, while celebrating his august career, inadvertently showcased his more free-spirited side. There he was, on the front page of the Times, perched on his staircase in an oxford shirt, slacks, and pterodactyl-like bare feet. And, again, in a Newsday article, in stocking feet and using his desk as an ottoman. By the time the May 22nd issue of People appeared, featuring a photo of Wallace sprawling unshod on the living-room sofa--a white one!--you had to wonder what was with all the exposure. The sight of his naked extremities felt vaguely taboo, akin to glimpsing F.D.R. in a wheelchair.

It used to be that going barefoot carried, as going bareheaded once did, a whiff of impropriety: you had to have a good excuse, be it socioeconomic (e.g., street urchins, oppressed pregnant ladies), aesthetic (hippies, Lilly Pulitzer), or athletic (waterskiers, Kenyan runners), to let your toes hang out. (Feet can give a lot away: they are the transvestite's Kryptonite.) But if the quintessential shoe-snubber of summers past was Britney Spears--who was famously photographed leaving a gas-station rest room au naturel--then the New Barefooter is a squarer specimen. Like Alex Bogusky, a shoeless subject of a recent BusinessWeek cover, entitled "The Craziest Ad Guys in America," he's kicking off his wingtips, not his platform flip-flops.

So, how has corporate America come to be subjected to the corn-and-bunion assailments of those subway ads promising relief for chronic foot pain? Perhaps the pivotal moment was the dot-com boom, when Californians enjoyed a brief period of credibility. A Time cover from 1996 featured Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape, sitting on a gold throne with his jeans rolled up to reveal a pair of large, unkempt paws. "We got all these grossed-out letters," an editor recalled, "saying his toenails were too long."

Another key practitioner was the I.C.M. agent Ed Limato, who, this March, ...