My grandfather wandered around a bit in the beginning, visiting the Chicago Exposition and helping to dig the locks between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron; he then went and stayed with an uncle in St. Louis and went to barber college. He spent oh, lots and lots of years running the shop in Kingman, Indiana and it was where the “menfolk” all gathered and discussed just about everything. My cousin, Glenda, says she never heard him say a bad word about anyone. He sang in the real barbershop quartet.
After he had died and my grandmother had gone to a nursing home, which really wasn’t necessary and she did complain about there “being only old folks here” to my dad, her sister-in-law Maude Drake outright insisted my father load one of the chairs from the shop in the back of his car and bring it home.
Aunt Maude was a classy lady and when my mother told me, “Maude made your dad take it,” I knew that meant he had absolutely no choice.
A rather crude way to put it would be that most of the male butts in Kingman and the surrounding area, along with traveling salesmen sat in that chair at one time or another. Farmers, merchants, doctors, lawyers, judges and the old-timers my dad said used to tell tales of fighting Indians in the Old West. Many an election was discussed, many a basketball or baseball game, many the news of the wars, both One and Two and Korea.
I don’t believe there were any real established hours; the lights burned as long a men were willing to sit and talk. Sometimes I stare at it and imagine the flow of men who sat there as the country went along for half a century; their faces pass in front of me and I can almost hear the conversation, the greetings called out as someone new came in. It was a place where everyone knew your name.
I’m just about the only one who sits in it now, but somehow I never feel alone.
