Missouri Life June 2023

Friends since preschool, as the old photo they display attests, Shelby Mares (left) and Stephanie Schupp bought the Moberly staple Bud’s Barber & Style Shop—now Bud’s Hair Lounge—in 2022. The duo continues to serve Bud’s longtime customers and have added new services.

Shop owners Shelby Mares and Stephanie Schupp, yet so is paying homage to the shop’s heritage. Friends since they were preschoolers, the hometown daughters, now both 31, reopened the shop last fall, two years after the original proprietor died. Before he retired in 2019, Lester “Bud” Prewitt had owned and operated the downtown business—then called Bud’s Barber & Style Shop—for 47 years. Stephanie described Bud as “a long-time staple” in Moberly. She is a real estate investor and heard last summer that the shop was for sale. She was eager to bring Shelby, a cosmetologist, on board as a business partner. Shelby also had a family connection to the shop: Her husband, Adam, was Bud’s nephew. During their renovations last fall, they painted paneling and built stations with doctor’s cabinets from an old office upstairs. They kept Bud’s original chair and sign. While the shop prides itself on attracting a diverse new generation of customers with an expanding menu of services, they still serve all of Bud’s old customers, says Shelby, who is studying to add the title of barber to her business card so that she can offer the popular straight-razor shaves, too. “Our idea was to keep Bud’s memory and barber shop alive but to kind of put a modern twist on it,” Stephanie says with reverence for the former owner. “It’s been an honor to keep the business going.”

schools in the state of California. And back then, she says, she didn’t think about herself as bucking the stereotype of males as barbers— even though she dubs herself the “Lady Barber” on business cards. “Of course, I never really thought about it because that’s what I wanted to do. And I really didn’t care,” she says. As a teenager, Russell didn’t necessarily plan to follow in his father’s footsteps, yet at age 20, he decided to go to barber school and now, at 49, he hasn’t looked back. Working alongside his father was fun, he says, and barbering is “the only thing I’ve ever done.” The story of Joseph “Joey” Thomas, owner of 180V Barber Salon near 18th and Vine in Kansas City, began differently. Doing hair runs in his family, too—his mother, LaDonna Adams, is a Kansas City cosmetologist—yet as a teenager Joey dreamed of studying at the New York Film Institute. “Yeah, I wanted to be like a mix between Ice Cube and Spike Lee,” he says. Unfortunately, financial setbacks kept him home in Kansas City to help out, then led him to barber school. After 20 years as a neighborhood barber, though, he says he’s grateful his career path changed. Hearing customers talk about the needs of his community—first at his shop about four miles south of the Jazz District and now at his shop in the historic Lincoln Building—inspired him to start the Know Joey? Foundation in 2007. At Thanksgiving, he and other volunteers donate turkeys to under served families through the foundation’s Turkey Tuesday program. Through the Fresh Cut Fresh Start program, they offer free back-to school haircuts for boys and young men.

A LEGACY WORTH PASSING FORWARD Some Missouri barbers chose the career early in life.

Nearly 60 years ago, barber training was a birthday present to Robin and her brother, Bill Lineberger, from an uncle who owned five barber

40 / MISSOURILIFE.COM