Tom Falzone never would have called himself a hair stylist, not on your life. Hair stylists work the frou-frou joints and clip you a double-sawbuck for a lousy trim.
Falzone, who ran the Five Corners Barber Shop in Glen Ellyn for 33 years until he died last December, was a barber plain and simple, a burly, barrel-chested little guy who boxed semipro as a kid and held court from his favorite chair — always the right-hand chair facing you — while chattering a blue streak about Harley-Davidson motorcycles, golf, fishing, politics and how he hated wearing his blankety-blank toupee.
Look around the cramped two-chair shop today and you see his collection of antique shaving mugs, razor strops and a wall covered with one-of-a-kind monogrammed golf balls. (A particularly nasty old green parrot was given the boot after nipping one too many customers.)
And his stories.
If you started Falzone jabbering about the old days, when he taught barbering at the long-defunct Weedins Barber College on West Madison Street in Chicago, it was pure gold, especially those graphic descriptions of nervous students practicing their straight razor moves on Skid Row drunks. (“One old souse flipped his head, and, I swear, the kid I was teaching laid his cheek open from ear to jowl.”)
Falzone gave an honest $10 haircut, a little philosophy and a good horse laugh to take along on those boring Saturday morning errands. When he died, about 400 of his closest friends and customers stopped by the Leonard Memorial Home in Glen Ellyn to pay their respects, and, one suspects, delicately inquire if his daughter, Sue Cory, intended to keep the business going.
Listen, good barbers don’t grow on trees, you know.
Just up Main Street from Falzone’s joint in downtown Glen Ellyn, a similar scenario had played out a year earlier at the Duane Street Barber Shop with the death of owner Russell Martin. Two old barbers pass from the scene. One leaves an heir to continue his business; the other’s shop quietly closes. Between 1991 and 1997, the number of licensed barbers in Illinois declined to 6,283 from 7,397, according to the Illinois State Department of Professional Regulations. DuPage County saw eight barber shops disappear between 1996 and 1998.
Barbers get old. They retire. They die. And young barbers are a scarce commodity. Ask Cory, who has been looking for a dependable part-timer to share the load on Saturdays at Five Corners since February.
“I had a man from Wheaton call to see if I wanted to go part time in his shop,” says Cory, who picked up the trade in high school and has Saturdays where she gives 25 to 30 haircuts.
The problem?
Barbering is tough. You stand for eight hours straight. You come up lame with back and shoulder ailments. You get no lunch break if five customers are waiting, and in most shops you receive no medical benefits. (Paid vacations and sick days are a myth.)
So if you must fuss with hair, better you should go the hair stylist route. Everyone wants to be a hair stylist today. The money’s better, the hours more flexible, and, let’s face it, barbers suffer from an unhip public image. Think of those famous barbers of yore: Floyd from “The Andy Griffith Show,” Archie Campbell on “Hee-Haw” and Shorty from “Amos & Andy.” Perry Como kept his barber license up to date just in case, and in the “Peanuts” comic strip, Charlie Brown’s father was a barber.
But realistically, how many 22-year-olds in 1998 aspire to be Floyd the Barber?
Barber colleges? Certainly in a city the size of Chicago there must be a dozen or so barber colleges, right? No, not quite. A call to George Austin, owner of the Moeller Barber College, found a harried, impatient administrator: “I’ve told you people (writers) many times before, there are only three barber schools left. Mine, which was founded in 1893, and Cain’s Barber College and Styling School and McCoy’s Barber College. That’s it, goodbye now.”
Dan Fredericks, owner of The King’s Barber Shop in Wheaton, didn’t know of any west suburban barber programs still in existence. Fredericks, who has been at the same location since 1962, insists, “There’s nobody coming up to take these jobs. When I went to Weedins Barber College, Tom Falzone and his father were my teachers. You took 1,872 hours of training. You started in the free department where bums came in the back door, and when you got close to graduation they moved you out front to work with poor families. You learned tapered haircuts and flat-tops and there was a union to set prices, hours and days off. That’s all gone now.
“Last year one of my barbers moved to Connecticut. He’d been with us 28 years when his wife got a better job and he left. I ran an ad for his job in three papers, including the Tribune, for three months and got no responses. I finally found a guy from Lombard who’d sold his shop.”
The King’s Barber Shop in Wheaton is staffed by four full-time barbers, no appointment necessary. Sue Cory at the Five Corners Barber Shop holds to the same walk-in policy. Cory, a talkative sort like her father, maintains “everything flows easy in a good barber shop. Certain customers seem to meditate, they don’t want to talk. And sometimes everyone talks at the same time. That’s something my dad taught me. If you get your customers all going at once, they don’t mind waiting for a haircut. He used to say, `Sue, it’s not the haircut they come for. It’s your personality. You sell yourself.’ And I think he was right.”
Cory charges $10 for a basic haircut: taper or block, using the dry techniques of clipper, comb and scissors. “In barber college we learned more blending with the comb and scissors; we worked on dry hair,” she says.
Dan Fredericks will nick you $11 at The King’s Barber Shop, and, like Cory, most often works on dry hair. “Men wash their hair in the morning,” says Fredricks. “I don’t need to wash it again for them. Stylists wash your hair. That’s one reason they charge so much. And they don’t give true tapered haircuts or flat-tops. I still give more flat-tops than you’d guess, and I do repair work on customers who’ve gone to those chain outfits to save a buck.”
Cory concurs and adds, “My dad taught me flat-tops. They didn’t teach those in barber college. He’d say, `Watch me, Sue, this is how you do it.’ “
Long hours and skimpy benefits aside, Fredericks remains convinced, 34 years after the fact, that the Beatles are to blame for the demise of his profession: “We lost half the barbers in the state of Illinois when long hair became the style. Before the Beatles I had customers who’d come in every Saturday for a trim, every two weeks at the most. Then they went to six, eight and 10 weeks. Barber shops rely on repeat business, on building relationships with customers. The long hair hurt us, and most of the one- and two-chair shops went under.”
Like it or not, your corner barber shop appears headed the way of the buggy whip and black and white television. In 20 years, those quaint barber poles will make dandy decorations for the basement wet bar, a relic from the late 20th Century. And you’ll no doubt be paying twice as much to some fancy stylist for the same trim.
Neither Cory nor Fredericks holds much hope for a resurgence of interest in their profession, even if it is a ticket to steady self-employment.
“Most barbers I know seem content with their lives,” says Cory. “Your customers change, you never get bored. And like my dad said, you can’t worry about the customer who doesn’t come back. You just weren’t a good fit.
“Dad had one kid, a hockey player, who came in to have his head shaved. Dad would skin it off, but it was never short enough to suit him. Then he grew it long and I saw him at the funeral home when Dad died, sobbing and crying. My mother asked who it was and I said, `Oh Mom, that’s a kid from the barber shop, one of dad’s friends.”
Ah yes, that’s a curious point about barbers.
They have so many friends.
So many friends.
