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Flat-top with Fenders
by Steve
Lee
Someone always seemed to be keeping an eye on our heads,
specifically on the length of our hair in grade school. Teachers
would actually send notes home with shaggy students suggesting
it was time for a visit to Tony’s barbershop, the haircuttorium
within bicycling distance for the elementary school in our
neighborhood.
It was in a black and white checkerboard tiled storefront with
four gigantic barbers’ chairs equipped with levers for raising
and lowering. The massive chairs silently revolved at a touch
from the barber, allowing for angular access behind the ears, or
to face the wall-length mirror for watching the haircut in
process.
Tony the owner/maitre de barber had owned the place as long as
anybody could remember. He directed the waiting customers to
each barber in turn, I now just realized, to even out the tips
the barbers would receive from the adults. School kids would
come in with two dollars haircut money sealed in an envelope, so
none of it would be lost at the candy and ice cream store around
the corner on the way to Tony’s.
The magazine rack would be full of Outdoor Life magazines, if
you were lucky it would be busy enough that you could
surreptitiously slip in a copy of Argosy magazine without Tony
noticing. The best part about getting a haircut at Tony’s was
the Haircut Chart with twelve styles pictured, brought to you by Vitalis Hair Tonic Liquid.
My favorite selection, for the far-away in-the-future
late-teenage years when I would be working an after-school job
raking in $1.15 an hour, was the “Hollywood”.
Ah, the Hollywood. Long hair on both sides swept back behind the
ears, flowing down to be square-cut below the shirt collar; the
shirt collar would have a “ring-around” on the inside and on the
outside, a challenge to the mightiest of laundry detergents.
For the barbers the worst thing that could happen was the return
of a customer with the message “I sent my son in for a Haircut!”
This meant that Tony would have to check the receipts on the
spike next to the cash register to see which barber was
responsible for sending the customer home without getting his
mother’s moneys worth.
So, for me the Hollywood, with the bouffant pompadour front and
topside would be in the almost-an-adult future.
The “Flat-Top with Fenders”
was a combination of a carpenter’s
leveled short top with long Vitalised sides swept back behind
the ears, square-cut just above the collar. The really athletic,
know-no-fear older kids were he only ones daring enough to front
this style.
But a wise barber would suggest the “Young Dick Clark” because
he knew that all the kids’ older sisters watched American
Bandstand after school every day. So I would return home happy
in the knowledge that even though I didn’t have the ultimate in
hair styles, I was at least on the chart.
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