Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 17, 1995 TAG: 9509150019
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 18 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
There are barbershop men and there are salon men.
Salon men get shampooed and pampered by curly-haired women in shops with slick, post-modern names like "Salon One," "Hair Trends" and "Tangles: A Hair Studio."
Barbershop men get trimmed up by guys named Ed in shops with names like ... Ed's.
In salons, they have sweet-smelling goop called Biolage and Awapuhi. And you pay about $20 for a half-hour's work. That's a shampoo and haircut, no shave, 160 bits.
In most barbershops, it's still about $6 for a cut and a couple more for a shave - hot towel and all. And there's no awa-what's-it on the shelves, either. Just maybe some butch wax and a tall jar of Barbicide.
(Barbicide is a blue fluid that kills germs on combs. It is not what you want to do to your barber after a bad haircut.)
Me, I'm a confirmed salon man.
One guy I know, Baker, says "real men" go to barbers. He's been going to Highland Park Barber Shop since his first haircut. Baker is in politics, so he got all dodgy when I asked if he thinks I'm a real man.
But I don't go to a salon out of any need to be pampered. For me, it's a matter of vanity and self-preservation.
During my very first professional haircut, the barber laid a padded board across the arms of a barber's chair, gently sat me on it and patted my head. Then he wacked his way through my hair and a good ways into my ear lobe.
For my second haircut, the barber - a different one - made an errant pass at my bangs and neatly removed about half my left eye brow.
It's enough to make a kid grow up and commit mass barbicide.
And then there was Red Hall.
Red Hall, the Sweeney Todd of Grandin Court.
Red Hall, the demon barber of Brambleton Avenue.
At least that's the way us neighborhood kids thought of him in the long-haired early 1970s.
It was rumored that Red liked to snatch shaggy, unsuspecting children right off the sidewalk and into his Brambleton Avenue shop to cut their hair against their will.
And, rumor held, Red only knew how to give one kind of haircut: the crewcut.
There were enough onion-headed kids in our neighborhood for us to know we wanted no part of Red Hall. On the way to Olympic Park swimming pool, we crossed to the other side of the street when Red's barber pole came into view.
So, I put up with my mom's unwieldy scissors into my adolesence. By then, something of a hair-revolution had occurred in town.
From the dawn of man in the Roanoke Valley, men had gone to barbers and women to stylists.
From the dawn of man until 1975. That's when an enterprising woman from Richlands named Julie Hunsaker opened Roanoke's first unisex hair salon: The Upper Cut.
"The Mother of All Hair Salons," Hunsaker calls it.
It was a success from the first day, Hunsaker will tell you. Men flocked in.
"We had all these beautiful women working there," she explains. "The men just loved having a woman's hands in their hair."
Kind of like the bikini carwash idea, eh?
"Well, yes," Hunsaker concedes, "but a real classy one."
The Upper Cut is gone, but unisex salons are all over. Linda Nelson, the petite proprietor of Tangles on the City Market, cuts my hair. And she hasn't drawn blood yet.
Plenty of barbers are still around, too. Linda figures she could learn a thing or two about how to handle a pair of electric clippers from places like the Sunnyside Barbershop a block over from her, or the legendary Skagg's in Salem.
Red Hall? He's reclining in the big barber chair in the sky.
Another guy has been in Red's old shop for years now. He still gives crew cuts and flattops, but only to people who ask for them.
And the shop's got a new name.
Ed's.
Matt Chittum denies any acts of barbicide, though he admits to using awapuhi on occasion.
by CNB