North Star Writers Group

Now, to a lot of people, this may not seem like a life-altering event. But as a child of the 1950s and 1960s, haircuts have always occupied a very special place in my personal universe. Gimme a head with hair, long beautiful hair . . .

When I was little, my dad took me with him to see Joe the Barber. Other than a few years off for World War II and some job-related moving around the country, he had been going to Joe for haircuts since he was in high school. And for all those years Joe had been giving him exactly the same haircut, a tonsorial classic known as a “flat-top.”

My younger brother had hair that behaved exactly like our dad’s. With a few deft swipes of the electric clippers Joe the Barber could easily square off the top of his head so perfectly that my parents could stand him next to a chair, put a lamp on him and use him as an end table.

My hair was, unfortunately, not quite so cooperative. The closest I could get to a flat-top was a thing called a “Princeton,” in which Joe would shave most of my head to a blonde stubble, leaving a little sheaf right at the front that he would paste into a vertical salute with an intensely sweet-smelling waxy grease called “Butch Wax.”

As I got a little older I began to ask Joe the Barber to attempt some variations on the theme. He would always listen carefully as I described the cool way Rick Nelson’s hair fell across his forehead, nodding thoughtfully and saying, “You betcha!” Then he would shave most of my head to a blonde stubble, leaving a little sheaf right at the front that he would paste into a vertical salute with “butch wax.” If I complained that this is not how Rick Nelson’s hair looked, he would nod thoughtfully and say, “Well it’s how he would look if he had a ‘Princeton.’”

By the time I was in high school, the length of a person’s hair was becoming a symbol of social defiance, and I wanted more than anything to join The Movement. This led to the fateful day when the assistant principal glared at me across his desk and handed me a dollar to go across the street to get a trim because I had hair touching the top of my ears.

Then came college, and I said goodbye to barber shops for a few years. The closest I ever came to a haircut in those days was when a girl friend would want to fool around with my shaggy locks and get rid of something called “split ends.” As long as I had a supply of beer available and she didn’t paste any of my hair straight up, I was pretty much indifferent to the whole process.

For most of the years since those rebellious undergrad days, I’ve been forced by the norms of society to pay at least some attention to personal grooming. And this has forced me back into barber shops.

In the old Joe the Barber days, a barber shop was a distinctively “man” place. On a table in the corner sat a pile of assorted newspapers and Sports Illustrated magazines dating back a minimum of five years, along with a stack of Zane Gray novels. The aromas of shaving cream, Witch Hazel and, of course, Butch Wax hung thick in the air. A radio on a shelf over the mirror was somehow, at least in my memory, always broadcasting a baseball game. The conversation among the men in the shop was always about sports, cars, lawn care or politics.

Women were not really welcome in barber shops. They went to a distinctly woman sort of place called a “beauty parlor” where there were magazines like The Ladies Home Journal and rows of beehive-shaped hair dryers. The smell was hair spray and ammonia, and the radio played soft music that would not interfere with the conversation about the shocking dress Angie wore to the potluck at church.

Those days are, by and large, gone. Not only do women now go into barber shops, they are often the barbers. And many men patronize what has become a “hair shoppe” rather than the old “beauty parlor,” where they co-exist with women getting their hair curled and the color touched up. In fact, a lot of them get their own hair curled and the color touched up.

I’m not sure I would really want to go back to the old days. My haircuts arguably look a lot better now than they did when I was a kid. But as bad as they were, they always grew out.

And I kind of miss the smell of Butch Wax.

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This is Column # MB18. Request permission to publish here.