Missouri Life June 2023

STILL TRUE TO THE TRADITIONS From basic shaves and haircuts to stylish fades and artistic lines, services among even a small sampling of Missouri shops vary widely. Despite a few unusual customers, Robin has kept things simple for 44 years. After working as a barber in California for 14 years, she moved back to her hometown in 1978 with her husband and opened her shop on the west side of the square. “Natural hairstyling,” Robin explains, means she does shampoos, haircuts her customers can easily maintain, and shaves—although, she adds, she will also pick out perms for customers. While Robin’s appointment after Noah happens to be a woman need ing a trim, the straightforward proprietor says that offering services typically popular among women makes little business sense to her. “When I’m done with him,” she says of Noah, “he gets up and he leaves. If I was doing a woman, she’d sit over here in the dryer for 45 minutes, and I’d have to do her again”—meaning the styling process would put that customer right back in her barber’s chair for even more time. On the mirror behind that chair, prices are straightforward, too, and still low. About two years ago, Robin finally started charging $12 instead of $8 for a cut, after a longtime customer urged her to raise rates. Change also comes slowly—or not at all, if regulars have their way—at Walnut Street Barber Shop, a downtown Springfield fixture since 1943 in its 19th-century building. Customers can request everything from buzz cuts and fades to specialty cuts like Mohawks, yet the shop’s decor is stubbornly old-school, boasting its original wood paneling. Local writer and musician Michael Cochran has been walking in off the street for haircuts for at least 30 years, signing in at a book on a stand, then sitting down to wait in one of the padded office chairs lined up against one of the paneled walls. The shop’s three barbers work fast, so he doesn’t have to wait long. “All those other places try too hard,” he says with a chuckle, as shop owner Russell Gann cuts his hair and trims his beard. “I just love this place.” Russell’s father, John, was Michael’s barber when he first started coming there. In 1994, when John Gann bought the shop, he might have been only the second or third owner among its longtime bar bers in 50 years, although Russell says he isn’t sure, adding, “It seemed like these old guys kind of traded it around a bit.” Even when Russell started working alongside his father a year after John took ownership of the shop, two of the shop’s original barbers would still stop by from time to time. Russell bought the business from his dad in 2000, and he says the die-hard attitudes of his predecessors live on among some of their younger counterparts in the barbering business. “The biggest change I made when I took over was I put in a TV,” Russell says. “The old guys didn’t like the TV. They thought it was a distraction.” Russell kept the TV. However, he and his wife, Amy, also a barber and co-owner of the shop, don’t plan to make significant changes. “I don’t think I need to,” he says matter-of-factly. “It works, and I like it.”

Tim Keele, owner of Two-Bit Barber Company, renovated an 1883 building in downtown Sedalia for his shop.

One Missouri barber speculates that the demographic driving a demand for barbers’ services is the same one that collects tattoos and vintage typewriters. “What really made our industry come back was the hipsters,” says Tim Keele, whose Two-Bit Barber Company in downtown Sedalia offers old-fashioned, straight-razor, hot-lather shaves with a beer and cigar to a younger generation with a new appreciation for such luxuries. Indeed, the 44-year-old got a tattoo of a straight razor with a “K” for Keele to celebrate his barber school graduation in 2017. Lists of services at shops may have changed in the four decades since Robin trimmed a wrestling bear’s mane in Marshfield, but not the listening ears and sense of community that many barbers—and their neighborhood locations—provide. Waiting for a shave and a haircut at the 180V Barber Salon in Kansas City’s Jazz District, Raymond Beck sums it up: There’s “a lot of humanity in a barber shop,” he says.

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