THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, May 11, 1995 TAG: 9505110548
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KERRY DOUGHERTY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: YORKTOWN LENGTH: Long : 102 lines
At Cliff's Citgo on Route 17, the thick metallic smell of motor oil mingles easily with the scent of Vitalis and Brylcreem.
This is a place where you can get your tank filled and have a little taken off the sides at the same time.
``There's no other place like it in the entire United States,'' declares barber Eddie Edmondson. ``You never hear tell of a barber shop in a service station.''
In Yorktown, though, the people have grown accustomed to the odd coupling of Cliff's gas station and Eddie's barber shop since the two businesses teamed up more than a decade ago.
But today, after Eddie flicks the hair from the final customer's neck and snaps his straight razor into its case, he will end 55 years as a barber.
A hand-lettered sign on the door bears the bad news: ``NOTICE: I will be retiring on May 11. Thanks to all my customers for their business and friendship throughout the years. Eddie.''
Eddie Edmondson is 74 years old, but doesn't look it. Maybe it's the golf he plays four days a week that has given him a healthy, ruddy complexion. Or his thick mop of curly white hair. He handles a scary-looking straight razor with the steady hands of a surgeon.
The main problem with barbering for so many years, Eddie will tell you, is that your customers either go bald or die.
Edmondson still has customers who have been with him 50 years. After two years in the Navy during World War II, where he practiced on the heads of 1,100 Seabees, he opened a business in Yorktown. He married his wife 48 years ago and they have four children.
He sold the shop in 1984, thinking he would retire. But Cliff Alderman asked him to set up a chair in the Citgo station. ``I think it's been good for both of us,'' Edmondson says as he carefully clips the thinning hair of 81-year-old Kelsor Moore of Seaford, who had dropped by for a final Edmondson trim.
Along with complimentary coffee and Little Debbie snack cakes, Eddie serves up good conversation and no-nonsense haircuts. He charges $6 - up from 35 cents in 1940.
He probably could have made more money if he had hung a few ferns around the place and called himself a ``hair stylist,'' but that is not his style.
Moore rises slowly from the lone barber chair, checks his trim in the mirror. Edmondson shakes the sky-blue cape to prepare for the next customer.
``I'm going to miss him but I'm luckier than most,'' Moore says, casting a wistful glance at the worn leather chair he had sat in once a month for 30 years. ``My son-in-law says he'll come cut my hair after Eddie retires.''
Next in line is Gene Diamond, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who served two tours in Vietnam.
``He's too modest to tell you,'' Diamond says, ``that he's the only barber I ever heard of who'll go to the hospital to cut your hair if you're sick, or come to your home if you need him to.''
Edmondson just shrugs, concentrating on the nape of Diamond's neck.
In the final days of Eddie's barber shop, customers have jammed the tiny room. Many wear baseball caps, most chew toothpicks. Some need haircuts, others pay $6 for an unneeded trim and a last goodbye.
No one seems bothered by the incongruous sounds of the service station: the ringing of the bell every time a car pulls up to a pump, or the racing engine of a Thunderbird as mechanics hunker over its hood a few feet away.
Cliff Alderman, who has owned Cliff's since 1962 and worked there 10 years before that, would like to get another barber when Eddie's gone.
``The problem is, there aren't many barbers out there any more,'' he says. ``Maybe I'll start cutting hair or maybe we'll just play checkers in there.''
Edmondson doesn't cut the hair of many women, but Mildred Warren - she's ``older than Eddie'' - likes his touch. She finds the air in most beauty shops noxious, worse than exhaust fumes. ``Those chemicals and sprays strangle me to death,'' she says.
Warren's short strawberry-blonde hair has a little curl, and Edmondson is careful to cut it just so, drying it lightly around her ears with a dusty blow dryer.
Finished, he spins her around and hands her a mirror, reminding her to put her glasses on.
``I won't ask you if it's too short,'' he says, laughing.
``No, not at all,'' she says. ``It's got to last me a long time. Till I can find me another barber.''
Like other customers who have come in for their final session, Warren pauses by the door, as if reluctant to leave.
``I won't say goodbye, Eddie, I'll say so long,'' she says, clutching her cloth pocketbook close to her side. ``If you ever have anyone in Riverside Hospital and you want to come by the house and rest, you just c'mon.''
``I'll do that,'' says Eddie Edmonson with a smile. ``You'll be surprised.''
Sporting her final Edmondson cut, she picks up an oil filter for the tractor on her way out. ILLUSTRATION: Color staff photos by Tamara Voninski
After 55 years, barber Eddie Edmondson is hanging up his scissors.
Eddie Edmondson, left, cuts the hair of David Middleton while,
right, Gary Alderman, son of the gas station owner Cliff Alderman,
and Rick Rorrer, a mechanic, work in Cliff's Citgo. Edmondson
charged $6 for a haircut - up from 35 cents in 1940.
Eddie Edmondson sweeps the floor at Cliffs' Citgo on Route 17 in
Yorktown
by CNB