As a young boy, I liked going to the barbershop in Hampton. First, there were no girls in there, and at the time, I thought that was great. There was also a gumball machine, and if you had a penny, you could get one. After your haircut, the barber would give you a lollipop (that we called a sucker). If you were having a perfect day, there was also a Coke machine. If daddy would spring for a Coke, I didn’t mind the wait. You would also hear all kinds of manly stories at the barbershop, and some of them may have even been true.
You went through stages at the barbershop. When you were little, you started out on a bench-like seat the barber draped over the arms of the chair. As you got a little bigger, you moved to the cushion, and then eventually, you could sit in the chair without the cushion. The barber didn’t need to be very skilled in my early years. Like most of the other male children, I had a crew cut. The barber put the smallest shield he had on the clippers and ran it over your entire head. Two minutes and you were done. He’d finish you up by brushing off your neck with a bit of talcum powder. I’ve heard the experts have decided talcum powder is carcinogenic, but like so many other things from those days, we survived.
Like most teenage boys in the 70s, I decided I wanted to let my hair grow out. At some point, I got to the point where the hairstyle I wanted wasn’t something you could get at the barbershop. I had to go to a women’s beauty shop for that. I wanted to have longer hair, so the beauty shop was something I had to endure, but I hated it. I didn’t want to be there and didn’t even want to be seen there. Then when I got home, daddy would give me a hard time about my “haircut.” One of his favorite sayings was, “Mr. Ed would be proud of that mane.” I’m sure he could not have predicted the popular haircut that came along in the 80s, the mullet, which did actually look like a horse’s mane.
Years later, when I wanted a job, I returned to the barbershop. I went to the one in the Bonanza shopping center. The barbershop hadn’t changed much since my younger days. It was still mostly men in there, and you could catch up on all the essential things in life – the weather, how everyone’s corn, beans, and tomatoes were doing, etc. Depending on who else was there, you could get all kinds of tall tales and maybe even a racy story or two. I would eventually go full circle and go back to the crew cut. At that point, it seemed like a waste of time to go to the barber for that, and I quit going. I have moved on, I suppose, and have saved more than a few dollars, but I still remember it fondly.
P.S. I have to share one of my favorite barber stories:
I was in the barber chair, and a young kid came into the barbershop. The barber whispers to me that this is the dumbest kid he’s ever seen. He said he would prove it to me. So the barber has a dollar bill in one hand and two quarters in the other. He tells the kid to pick the one he wants. The kid chooses the quarters, and the barber says, “I told you.” As I’m leaving the barbershop, I see the kid drinking an Icee in the parking lot. I asked him why he picked the quarters over the dollar. He took another swallow of Icee and explained: “Because the day I take the dollar, the game is over.”