The Barber Rebellion
When I was a kid way back in the '50s, I got my hair cut on Saturdays at the neighborhood barber shop. At the corner of Ninth and Spruce was a triangular island occupied by Fredman's Drug Store at the apex, the Shoe Repair shop, and on the Northwest corner, facing Ninth, was Downey Brothers' Barber Shop.
The Downey Brothers held court in a room with three white porcelain and red leather Koken barber chairs with a gearshift handle on one side and a razor strop on the other. The room-width mirror behind the chairs reflected a few bowling trophies and the world outside the corner windows. The air was thick with the smells of hair tonic and clipper oil, to say nothing of the dense pall of cigarette smoke. In the summer, the air conditioner kept the little shop at bone-chilling, meat locker temperatures. It was so cold your hair stood on end, making it easier, I suppose, to lop it off.
Big Rex Downey always cut my hair. He had a no-nonsense demeanor about him - a stocky man with strong hands and a wry smile. He was the kind of man who drank beer from the bottle and could hurl a string of expletives when needed for emphasis. He told jokes to the regulars that I laughed at even though I really didn't understand the concepts involved until many years had passed. If my mom had heard them, big ol' Rex would have gotten a bar of Dial soap shoved in his mouth for sure.
When you went to Downey Brothers' you were automatically assigned an official nickname, each according to what Rex Downey thought you looked like: Tommy Jackson was "Cowboy:, Steve Fairhurst was "Shortstop", I was "The Professor", but it was pronounced, "Perfessor". These tags were like Federal judicial appointments, pronounced from on high, non-negotiable, non-exchangeable and set in stone for life. There were no girls here. Moms didn't bring their sons in for haircuts, dads did. Your mom could drop you off, but no closer than the shoe repair store on Spruce. Sisters need not apply. It was the last bastion of the XY chromosome club, the pinnacle of male separatism in a time before anyone was liberated from anything.
A barber shop was one of the few places that a kid growing up in the fifties was treated like anything more than a virus. You got to sit in the barber chair, although until you had reached a certain stature, you had to sit on top of a booster board that brought your shaggy head up to a workable height - you got the full treatment, scissors, clippers and the best part, a warm lather straight-razor shave around your ears and the nape of your neck, followed by a hot towel and a quick fan of talc. If you were inclined to shorter styles, you got your leading edge treated to the Butch Wax Stand Up treatment. If your hair was longer, Vitalis, Lucky Tiger or Red Rose was worked into your hair and combed smooth. Next!
When Rex shoved you out of that chair, you looked better, smelled better and somehow knew that even if all else in the world was going into the sewer, your hair looked good. You could run faster, jump higher, play harder. No, wait, that was Red Ball Jets shoes, but the feeling was the same.
The real function of barber shops though, was as a focal point for solving all the world's knotty problems quickly and surely. The radio waves back then weren't rife with pundits and bombastic know-it-alls, but barbers knew, somehow, how to fix everything. If there was a knowledge gap behind the chairs, the slack was taken up by the brain trust in waiting. Men gathered there, freed of the editorial restrictions of Holy Matrimony, to speak their minds, shoot the breeze and get caught up on what others were thinking and doing. Parenthetically, the barber shop was also a reading room where men could read things they couldn't read at home. Kids were kept away from the assortment of "special" magazines in the corner - I found out later that these magazines were special because they contained images of women who lay in languid, suggestive poses and in various stages of undress on the skins of exotic and quite dead mammals.
My own hormones began to bubble and percolate about the same time that the British Invasion landed on Ed Sullivan's New York stage. My conservative Princeton cut gave way to a moppish cross between what I thought a surfer looked like and the Mods of Carnaby Street. My dad was appalled, and was sure I had become a Communist. By the late sixties, I was in full-blown teen rebellion and had many more important things to think about than the state of my hair. Like cars. And girls.
Fast forward to the early seventies - I had been long away from the Downey Brothers. Political activism and a general attitude of rebellion had made my hair long, unruly and hard to deal with or even look at. My mom, ever the broker of new ideas, suggested I get my hair "styled". In the spirit of appeasement and against my better judgment, I made an appointment with a stylist at the Board of Trade Building, Corky Badami. Corky was no mere barber, this guy was an artist, a Michelangelo with clippers. His was no barber shop, it was a deluxe tonsorial salon. When I walked in, beflowered and looking like a refugee from Haight-Ashbury, Corky blanched. I again expressed my sincerity about wanted to again look "human", and Corky strapped me in his leather lounge chair, anesthetized me and had at it.
In the Great Celestial Book of Alpha Primo Haircuts, Corky Badami is listed as having undertaken a miracle transformation in Kansas City, Missouri in 1972. I had been shorn, shaved, layered and feathered, It was the NuWay Double Dip Super Cheeseburger of all haircuts. I had been reborn. Corky told me how to take care of my hair, and fully expected me to follow up on my new way of life. My aura was transcendent. My mother swooned. I went immediately to Sears and bought a new shirt. I considered the priesthood.
But something was missing from the experience. My hair looked good - no, it looked GREAT! But no one had mentioned Nixon or McGovern, VietNam, the post-Athletics absence of baseball in Kansas City or the reason for the Great Unbridgeable Indecipherable Chasm between women and men. There weren't any girlie magazines or bowling trophies. The air was clean, temperate and smoke-free. It was just about hair. It was about style over substance.
I learned you get different things from different people, even though the service they perform is basically the same - Corky showed me that presentation is everything. Rex made me realize that sometimes, a barbershop is better than a thesis and that you can't make an appointment to belong to a place in time. Every man my age has barber stories, barber memories and the suspicion that we might have let something important get away from us.
The Downey Brothers held court in a room with three white porcelain and red leather Koken barber chairs with a gearshift handle on one side and a razor strop on the other. The room-width mirror behind the chairs reflected a few bowling trophies and the world outside the corner windows. The air was thick with the smells of hair tonic and clipper oil, to say nothing of the dense pall of cigarette smoke. In the summer, the air conditioner kept the little shop at bone-chilling, meat locker temperatures. It was so cold your hair stood on end, making it easier, I suppose, to lop it off.
Big Rex Downey always cut my hair. He had a no-nonsense demeanor about him - a stocky man with strong hands and a wry smile. He was the kind of man who drank beer from the bottle and could hurl a string of expletives when needed for emphasis. He told jokes to the regulars that I laughed at even though I really didn't understand the concepts involved until many years had passed. If my mom had heard them, big ol' Rex would have gotten a bar of Dial soap shoved in his mouth for sure.
When you went to Downey Brothers' you were automatically assigned an official nickname, each according to what Rex Downey thought you looked like: Tommy Jackson was "Cowboy:, Steve Fairhurst was "Shortstop", I was "The Professor", but it was pronounced, "Perfessor". These tags were like Federal judicial appointments, pronounced from on high, non-negotiable, non-exchangeable and set in stone for life. There were no girls here. Moms didn't bring their sons in for haircuts, dads did. Your mom could drop you off, but no closer than the shoe repair store on Spruce. Sisters need not apply. It was the last bastion of the XY chromosome club, the pinnacle of male separatism in a time before anyone was liberated from anything.
A barber shop was one of the few places that a kid growing up in the fifties was treated like anything more than a virus. You got to sit in the barber chair, although until you had reached a certain stature, you had to sit on top of a booster board that brought your shaggy head up to a workable height - you got the full treatment, scissors, clippers and the best part, a warm lather straight-razor shave around your ears and the nape of your neck, followed by a hot towel and a quick fan of talc. If you were inclined to shorter styles, you got your leading edge treated to the Butch Wax Stand Up treatment. If your hair was longer, Vitalis, Lucky Tiger or Red Rose was worked into your hair and combed smooth. Next!
When Rex shoved you out of that chair, you looked better, smelled better and somehow knew that even if all else in the world was going into the sewer, your hair looked good. You could run faster, jump higher, play harder. No, wait, that was Red Ball Jets shoes, but the feeling was the same.
The real function of barber shops though, was as a focal point for solving all the world's knotty problems quickly and surely. The radio waves back then weren't rife with pundits and bombastic know-it-alls, but barbers knew, somehow, how to fix everything. If there was a knowledge gap behind the chairs, the slack was taken up by the brain trust in waiting. Men gathered there, freed of the editorial restrictions of Holy Matrimony, to speak their minds, shoot the breeze and get caught up on what others were thinking and doing. Parenthetically, the barber shop was also a reading room where men could read things they couldn't read at home. Kids were kept away from the assortment of "special" magazines in the corner - I found out later that these magazines were special because they contained images of women who lay in languid, suggestive poses and in various stages of undress on the skins of exotic and quite dead mammals.
My own hormones began to bubble and percolate about the same time that the British Invasion landed on Ed Sullivan's New York stage. My conservative Princeton cut gave way to a moppish cross between what I thought a surfer looked like and the Mods of Carnaby Street. My dad was appalled, and was sure I had become a Communist. By the late sixties, I was in full-blown teen rebellion and had many more important things to think about than the state of my hair. Like cars. And girls.
Fast forward to the early seventies - I had been long away from the Downey Brothers. Political activism and a general attitude of rebellion had made my hair long, unruly and hard to deal with or even look at. My mom, ever the broker of new ideas, suggested I get my hair "styled". In the spirit of appeasement and against my better judgment, I made an appointment with a stylist at the Board of Trade Building, Corky Badami. Corky was no mere barber, this guy was an artist, a Michelangelo with clippers. His was no barber shop, it was a deluxe tonsorial salon. When I walked in, beflowered and looking like a refugee from Haight-Ashbury, Corky blanched. I again expressed my sincerity about wanted to again look "human", and Corky strapped me in his leather lounge chair, anesthetized me and had at it.
In the Great Celestial Book of Alpha Primo Haircuts, Corky Badami is listed as having undertaken a miracle transformation in Kansas City, Missouri in 1972. I had been shorn, shaved, layered and feathered, It was the NuWay Double Dip Super Cheeseburger of all haircuts. I had been reborn. Corky told me how to take care of my hair, and fully expected me to follow up on my new way of life. My aura was transcendent. My mother swooned. I went immediately to Sears and bought a new shirt. I considered the priesthood.
But something was missing from the experience. My hair looked good - no, it looked GREAT! But no one had mentioned Nixon or McGovern, VietNam, the post-Athletics absence of baseball in Kansas City or the reason for the Great Unbridgeable Indecipherable Chasm between women and men. There weren't any girlie magazines or bowling trophies. The air was clean, temperate and smoke-free. It was just about hair. It was about style over substance.
I learned you get different things from different people, even though the service they perform is basically the same - Corky showed me that presentation is everything. Rex made me realize that sometimes, a barbershop is better than a thesis and that you can't make an appointment to belong to a place in time. Every man my age has barber stories, barber memories and the suspicion that we might have let something important get away from us.
