In 1998, shoeshine man Royal Zeno of St. Paul was told that he had lost the contract to operate his business at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
After some public outrage and some high profile support, Zeno was allowed to continue the business, which he had owned since 1970, and where he had worked for many years previously.
Zeno, 90, who last worked in September, died Saturday in St. Paul. He had received a pacemaker a few months ago.
"In his 80s, he was fighting for his business," said his daughter Rosemary Zeno of St. Paul, who worked with her father. He said at the time, 'I just want to keep my business going.'"
He grew up in New Orleans, and by age 10 he was working as a delivery boy. After serving with an artillery unit in Fort Sill, Okla., during World War II, he worked on a barge on the Mississippi River, and discovered the Twin Cities.
He liked the area, and he liked to fish. So he moved to St. Paul in the 1940s. First, he worked in St. Paul as a meatpacker and then for Elwood Johnson's airport shoeshining business, later becoming a partner and then sole owner.
In 1998, when his proposal and another's at the airport lost out in a bidding process, about 1,000 petition signatures were gathered, many of them from customers.
The NAACP and the likes of political heavyweights Hubert Humphrey III, then Minnesota's attorney general; Mike Hatch, then a candidate for state attorney general, and Mike Freeman, then the Hennepin County attorney, came out in support of Zeno.