My father sung this in boy scouts which would have been in the 1940s. He talked about this and said the words are "Light she WASN'T like a fairy and her shoes were number nine herring boxes without topses sandals were for Clementine." Was all saying she was a very large girl. There were NO shoes in her size so she had to use number 9 herring boxes as sandals. The thing that has probably changed is how fish are packed. It isn't a shoe size it is a box size for an individual fish. Fish were packed in San Francisco and shipped to the mines.