Shining shoes.

A video on "fire shining" boots.

Does anyone even do this anymore?

Shine their shoes to a  high polish, that is.

Maybe they do.  I still see shoe shine stands in places like airports, for example, and I see people getting their shoes shined there.  But It's certainly not like it once was.

When I was a kid, my father wore wingtips down to his office nearly every day.  He has a black pair and an oxblood pair.  I associated those sorts of shoes with adult work, as a result. 

He didn't keep them shined to a high polish, but he did polish them relatively regularly.  

Later, when I was a CAP cadet in my mid-teens, I was issued a pair of the then current black Corcoran jump boots, which are I'd note a fine boot.  I'm surprised that we were issued something of such quality, frankly, but we were, which may have been as the USAF issued jump boots to their MPs at the time (they might still, I don't know) and our feet were small.  In retrospect, they had a surprising amount of stuff for small sized servicemen that was issued to the CAP, including Tiger Stripe jungle combat trousers that, if you look it up, were never "official" issue to anyone. Well, be that it may, they had a lot of them and I had several pairs as a result.  

Now, by the way, they're worth a fortune.

I wore mine duck hunting and then, when I grew too big for them (they were really small) I gave them away.

Anyhow, once I had black jump boots I had to learn how to shine them, which I did.

That's the first I'd ever heard of fire shining, as some of the CAP cadet officers were big on stuff like that.  I never did it, and still haven't, as I don't like playing with fire.

I did learn, however, how to polish jump boots to a high shine, something that proved useful when I joined the National Guard, as we were issued black combat boots and the Army was big on shining shoes at the time.

When I mustered out of the Guard I more or less mustered out of regularly shining shoes.  I occasionally shine my cowboy boots and I also will occasionally shine my dress shoes.  I really ought to more often than I do.  I don't shine my boots, i.e., my boots that aren't cowboy boots, ever.  I will occasionally water proof them, however.

Of course, really formal dress shoes are simply worn less often than they once were.  I don't wear mine every day, although I'm sure a week hardly ever goes by when I don't wear them.  Still, I'm not very good about polishing them.

Fire shine?  Well, hardly necessary.  Simply using shoe polishing and buffering gets all the shine you really need.