Also Aids caused Barbers to quit using razors to finish out the Haircut. The last haircut I paid for was awful and a nasty tempered barber to complete it. Bought myself some Clippers and have cut it myself for over twenty years, wear a cap when I go out so if I mess it up no one will ever know.
I liked barbershops. It was a place you could be a guy, around other guys undergoing a ritual. It was a ritual, and it has been my experience that a lot of guys like rituals, even small ones.
There were women you could find in barbershops, but they weren’t there to have their hair cut like they sometimes are today. They were almost always there with a six or seven year old kid, and sometimes a whimpering three year old who found the experience somewhat intimidating and even scary.
There was something stable about a barbershop. Many of the barbershops I went to in my life gave an impression of having been (and in reality, had been) around for a long time.
Very few of them were polished and clean. They were tidy, not like a fastidious sparkling tidiness, but more like the tidiness that came from the little piles of hair they would sweep up in between haircuts.
There were calendars on the wall, sometimes current, and sometimes a bit dated and faded, calendars with cars, calendars with attractive women or even pin-up girls that were racy but not obscene.
The tables near the chairs we waited in were covered with magazines such as Popular Science or Popular Mechanics, and sometimes Life, Newsweek, and Time, in a time before those magazines turned fully to the Left.
There was often an old bakelite clock, and the barber chairs were aged, but still well kept. No rips or tears.
Almost all of them I remember had the linoleum floors, sometimes dark tiles, sometimes light, sometimes dark and light tiles laid in a pattern.
There were walls of mirror, jars of liquid with combs in them, various potions and implements that had their backsides reflected out to you in the mirrors. The woodwork around and above the mirrors and under the counters seemed always to be dark-stained, almost black.
In the front window there might be a barber pole (when it wasn’t outside the door) sometimes lighted, sometimes rotating. And in that window, you might see a picture of a Little League team with some trophy or plaque next to it.
Yes. I miss that, in the same way I find myself missing the Boy Scouts of America. Like the Boy Scouts, barbershops had the air of a masculine refuge that are an anachronism in the eyes of some who view masculinity as something to be stamped out.
I don’t get my hair cut anymore. And I miss it.