ONCE A BARBER…

 My grandfather was a barber. I’m talking about Whitie’s dad, my Grandpa Murel Newland. A lot of people never knew him as a barber, because he did a lot of other things in his life. But he never forgot having been a barber—kept the tools of his trade all his life, razors, scissors, hand and electric clippers, barber combs and neck brushes. Kind of like someday he might just take it up again.

My Grandma Alice—she was a Henry before she married my grandfather, and her people were from Paulding, Ohio, her father a teamster when teamsters still drove horse-drawn wagons, the Henries on one side and the Hamiltons on the other—used to let me get the barbering tools out and look at them when Grandpa wasn’t home, because she knew I’d be very careful, whereas she never would have trusted my brother or cousins with them, especially the razors! But she realized somehow that I took these things as a curiosity, that my interest was almost “scientific”, that all I wanted to do was hold them and look at them and be able to picture them in my head, and picture Grandpa using them.

She did the same thing with a single-shot 20-gauge shotgun that my youngest uncle had left behind when he went into the Methodist seminary, and with the compact little Puma .22-caliber six-shooter that Grandpa kept under the front seat of his Studebaker for a lot of the years that he was a life insurance salesman in a few dicey neighborhoods. That was back when a lot of people still paid cash, and he would travel around his “debit”—which is what insurance men of those days called their sales territory—collecting premiums when they came due.

Sometimes I would ask her to tell me about when Grandpa was a barber. Grandma never had a problem telling you a story over and over. It was one of the things my mother, Reba Mae, criticized about her. “God!” she would tell my dad, “If I have to hear your mother tell the same stories over that I’ve heard a million times this Thanksgiving, I’m going to lose my mind!”

But I was only too glad to hear the stories again and again and sometimes she added some new detail that I’d never heard before. When I asked about Grandpa’s barbering years, she would go all the way back to when he was a little boy in the early nineteen-hundreds, living in Alger, Ohio, over in Hardin County. The village, which even today has a population that doesn’t reach nine hundred, back then was quite new. It had only been incorporated in 1896 and Murel was born in 1898. Murel’s father, Elmer Newland—his mother was the former Maude Bower—was the barber in town, and as such also, as barbers were back then, a sort of minor surgeon for every sort of wart, mole, cyst or small tumor, since to handle things like that in those days all you had to be was good with a razor. He also was the ad hoc dentist. Not that he could do bridgework, or fill molars or make dentures, but if a client was suffering and didn’t mind having a tooth pulled with a pair of fairly clean pliers, Elmer was your man.

Murel had been Elmer’s apprentice from the time he was still too small to reach the client without a stool to stand on. But the first thing Elmer taught him to use was a straight-razor, and the boy quickly became proficient at it.

When he was old enough, Murel would leave Alger and move to the “big city”. Indeed, the industrial town of Lima back them had a big-city feel. According to Grandma Alice, he first barbered in a major hotel—probably the posh Hotel Argonne, which now is an historical site, but which back then was a beautiful new piece of Lima architecture, constructed on downtown Elizabeth Street right after World War I, opening its doors to the public in 1919. But ever hot-headed and ready to fight at the drop of a hat, Murel couldn’t get along with the other barber who had also managed to get a chair in that fine establishment.

Alice always described the other barber as “a wop”. I had no idea what that meant, but I could tell by how she said it that she intended disdain. Later, I would retell the story to Reba Mae, and, following Grandma’s lead, would describe the barber in question as a wop. My mother stopped me mid-story and told me that just because Grandma Alice said things like that, it didn’t mean I should. I asked her what it meant and she explained that wop meant “without papers” and that it was a nasty term for Italian immigrants. She assured me that Italians were very nice people and asked me to think how I’d feel if I was an Italian and some little snotnose called me that.

I decided to eschew the word from my lexicon, and later consulted with Reba Mae whenever my grandmother used such other dubious terms as kraut, kike, wet-back, mick and spic. I didn’t think any less of Grandma Alice for it. I just figured she didn’t know any better, and that perhaps Reba Mae was the wiser of the two. Hers, then, was the lead I’d follow.

It seems that the enmity between the two barbers eventually boiled over and Murel ended up clocking the other man. Now, Murel never weighed more than a hundred and fifty pounds soaking wet, but he was absolutely lethal—as would be my Uncle Red after him—with his fists. Each blow arrived on target with every one of those hundred and fifty pounds behind it. In this case, it was an uppercut to the ear, that ripped the lobe loose from the other barber’s head and a right cross to the jaw that knocked him out.

Cook & Newland Barbershop, Lima, Ohio, 1925

After that incident, Murel was invited to give up his chair at the hotel and at some point after that, he opened up the new place in the basement of the pharmacy on the Public Square with a partner with whom he apparently got along famously. The Italian barber, for his part, started a rumor that when the doctor had sewn his ear back fast to his head, he’d told him that Murel couldn’t have done that with his fist, that he must have slashed the other man with his razor.

One day Murel took time out from work to drop by the hotel again. He walked into the barbershop and said to the other barber, who went pale when he saw him, “I hear you been a-talkin’ a lot o’ hooey about how I cut you with a razor. Tell you what, keep on a-runnin’ your damn mouth and I’ll be back to knock your other ear loose too."

The rumor dissipated and died.      

Anyhow, when I visited Grandma’s house, which I often did, I was allowed to get out all of those things—the barbering tools and the guns—and lay them out on the bed in the guest room or on the floor in front of the hall closet, where they were all kept, even while I was still in grade school. There was only one time when I proved unworthy of that kind of trust. But it didn’t happen at their house. It happened once while we—my family and Grandma and Grandpa—were on vacation together in the Upper Peninsula. We were staying, as usual, in one of the cabins at the Buckeye Rustic Resort, on Lake Manistee, which belonged to Murel’s old insurance partner, Morris Butcher. I must have been about six at the time. And I loved being there with Whitie and Grandpa Murel and Morris. I watched Grandpa’s every move, whether he was fishing or organizing his tackle, or going through his morning ablutions at the galvanized metal kitchen sink in that cabin that was basically one huge room, a small screened-in front porch, a utilitarian privy—just a rudimentary toilet—off of the porch and three bedrooms off of the big main room, the central feature of which was a large potbellied woodstove, and which served as kitchen, dining room, living room and extra sleeping room provided by a fairly comfy couch and a small, dusty, sleeping loft to which access was gained via a steep barn-ladder.

On the morning in question, I’d been watching Grandpa shave, while Grandma Alice and my mother, Reba Mae, were busy preparing a breakfast of eggs, bacon, toast and pancakes on the wood-burning cook-stove. It was, for me at least, a fascinating process, because Murel wouldn’t have thought of using a Schick electric shaver like Whitie did. And back then, he still even refused to use a safety razor—he wouldn’t do that until the advent of Wilkinson Sword Steel razorblades, which were the only ones, according to him, that could rival a straight-razor. He still shaved the way he’d been taught as a barber: standing in from of a little piece of mirror above the sink in his trousers and undervest, soaking his face first with a scalding hot towel over which he’d poured water directly from the teakettle, then lathering up with thick foam that he’d whipped up thoroughly by vigorously beating a bar of Williams Shaving Soap in a mug with his long-bristled shaving brush. It was a veritable morning ritual the climax of which was when, with long, clean, careful strokes of a gleaming razor that he had conscientiously stropped, before the whole process began, he would give himself the cleanest shave ever.

Then he’d say, “Feel that, Danny, what do you think?” And I’d run my hand across his jaw and say, “Smooth, Grandpa!” And then he’d say, “Smoothest shave you can get. There’s nothing like a straight-razor.”

On this particular morning, when Murel finished his shave and I didn’t miss a beat of the whole process, I waited until he’d wiped the remaining traces of foam from his face and razor with a hand towel and slapped on his Rexall Bay Rum cologne and expected to see him carefully put the slim razor away in his dop kit before going to the table for breakfast. But just then I heard Whitie call, “Hey Dad, come here a sec and look at this,” from out on the porch, and Grandpa left everything on the drain board and went out.

There was nobody right there. Whitie and Grandpa were out on the porch, Grandma and Reba Mae were busy with breakfast preparation, my brother was just a baby and still fast asleep and my big sister hadn’t gotten up yet either. I figured this was my chance. I whipped up the soap in the shaving mug with Grandpa’s brush and liberally soaped up my face and chin and throat, as I’d so often watched Grandpa do. Then I unfolded the gleaming blade. Grandpa had made it look so easy. So I imitated the way he held the razor to the best of my ability and scraped foam from one cheek with a long stroke, and then started to pull it down the opposite cheek. This time I felt a white-hot burn, and razor and foam came away scarlet. It was just then that I heard my grandfather shout, “What in tarnation are you doing you little dickens!”

And then he was there, snatching the razor out of my hand and quickly lifting me up under his arm to stick my face under the tap, before running icy well water on the wound to try and stop the bleeding. My mother, who heard the commotion, came running over and I heard her exclaim, “Oh my god!”

Murel said, “He’s okay, I’m just a-washin’ it off. Then I’ll put some styptic on that and he’ll be good as new.”

“Stypic!” my mother shouted.

“Just go on back over there and let me handle this,” Murel scolded, and, incredibly, she went.

Expert barber, he had the bleeding stopped in no time and sat me on the edge of the drain board and daubed the cut with a styptic pencil that burned like fire, but closed the wound up so that by later that day it was just a scratch. Reba Mae was furious with me and barely spoke to me the rest of the day. Whitie wasn’t even aware anything had happened. After lunch my Grandma Alice, who always amazed me with her sensible approach and with her unshakable calm in the midst of everyday emergencies walked up to me on the boat dock where I sat, rather dejectedly at having screwed up and been such an idiot, pretending to fish.

“Hey bub,” she said. “Whatcha doing?”

“Fishing, Grandma,” I said laconically.

“Catchin’ anything?”

I shook my head without turning around.

“Hey, look here a second,” she said. I put my fishing rod down, swiveled around on the rough planks and stood up.

She patted my head affectionately with one hand. The other one she was holding behind her back. “Tell you what,” she said, “Next time you feel like you ‘need a shave’, use this.” She brought the hand around from behind her back and handed me something. I took it and saw that it was a very old-fashioned Gillette safety razor with no blade in it. She realized all I wanted to do was imitate Murel and she couldn’t see the harm in it. She even gave me my very own can of Foamy shaving cream and I would enjoy standing by Grandpa applying foam to my face and scraping it off with the bladeless razor whenever we were together and it was time for him to shave.

I kept that old safety razor, and started using it with a real Gillette Blue Blade in it when I was thirteen and first started shaving. And I kept using it until I went into the Army at age twenty, long after Grandma Alice had passed away from cancer and Grandpa Murel had remarried to her first cousin, Floetta, who’d had a crush on him since she was a preteen.  

I was remembering all this because I recently came across a picture of Murel, before he was anybody’s grandpa, in his barber shop on the Square in downtown Lima, Ohio. It was an antique picture that somebody had posted on the memory site of my hometown, Wapakoneta. The back of the photo had an inscription in careful cursive that identified it as a picture of Bob Cook and Murel Newland’s barbershop under Thompson’s drug store in Lima. It also identified Murel as the father of Norm Newland, Whitie’s given name. It said that the photo had been taken circa 1925-26.

For the first time in my life, my grandfather’s barbering days were no longer just invented snapshots in my childhood imagination, the product of Alice’s tales of their youth. I now could see Murel, the twenty-seven-year-old, father of two boys, Whitie and his brother Red, who still couldn’t know that he would be the father of four boys and grandfather to twelve grandkids, a slight, cocky young man in an impeccable white shirt and tie, standing next to his barber’s chair in the shop he shared with his erstwhile partner. Suddenly, it was no longer family folklore, but documented history and it was as if I could embrace my grandfather’s youth as a fond memory of my own.