Missouri Life June 2023

When Missouri Life featured Newtonia’s Ted Arnall in a 1973 story, he had been cutting hair and telling tales in his small town barber shop for 62 years. Fifty years later, Ted and his shop are immortalized on a mural in Newtonia, and the qualities he embodied of providing good service for a fair price ($1.25 for a haircut back in ’73) live on in the barber shops we visited for our 50th anniversary update. It’s Noah West’s third visit to Robin Rader’s barber shop in the southwest Missouri town of Marshfield, but it’s the first time the sixteen-year-old has heard the story of Victor the wrestling bear, one of Robin’s visitors some 40 years ago. Yes, a 650-pound Alaskan brown bear once lumbered into the shop. “It was so funny,” says Robin, remembering the bus that pulled up in front of Rader’s Barber Shop and Natural Hairstyling. “This guy came in and he stood there. And he said he had somebody else out there he needed to get in for a haircut.” The bear’s trainer was kidding about getting Victor’s mane trimmed, of course. Still, he brought Victor inside long enough to pose for a photograph that still hangs above a mirror at the shop: It shows Robin with her scissors poised to clip a hank from the gigantic bear’s fur as he faces away from the four-foot-nine barber like an ordinary customer. It’s still quite a story to tell her customers—and barber shops like Robin’s are full of those. Fifty Missouri barbers have closed their doors over the past two years, according to the Missouri Board of Cosmetology and Barber Examiners, possibly because some weren’t able to recover after the pandemic. Nevertheless, 1,100 locations were still open in February, board statistics show—and the number of licensed barbers has grown by more than 200 to 3,060 since November 2021.

Robin Rader, 80, owner of Rader’s Barber Shop on Marshfield’s square since 1978, chats with customer Noah West, 16, who tells her about his dream of becoming a country music artist.

37 / JUNE 2023