Field Notes: Everything I really need to know about people, I learned in the barber shop

Aug 06, 2023

There was exactly one retail commercial building in Slater, the little mill village where I grew up. The big, brick two-level building contained Roy and Kate Whitmire’s grocery store, the fire department and the post office, along with my father’s barber shop, which was next door to my mother’s beauty shop. I spent much of my early formative years in and around their barber and beauty shops.

Longtime Greenville County Councilman Joe Dill once told me that my father always reminded him of Floyd the barber on “The Andy Griffith Show.” I smiled in agreement and added that the barber shop itself was also a reasonable facsimile for the one where Andy and Barney used to hang out.

When I was just a little boy, the men waiting on their haircuts would tell me wonderful stories that usually began with, “Back when I was your age…” Sometimes they would read to me from the photo captions in the big oversized Life and Look magazines; and if I didn’t understand, they would tell me what the words meant. My first grade teacher told my parents that when I came to school I was already reading on second grade level. Those fellows, who just stopped by for a haircut, could not have known that they were helping kindle a lifelong passion for learning.

I remember when astronauts landed on the moon, and one of my father’s customers claimed the whole thing was fake, filmed out in the dessert in Arizona. He maintained that he knew it was bogus, because he had a friend whose aunt lived out West, and this aunt claimed her neighbor’s son worked on the film crew that rigged the whole thing. Actually, I knew several people who believed the whole “man on the moon” thing was a hoax. These were often the same people who believed that Bigfoot was real. It seems that some people are naturally predisposed to believe in conspiracy theories, hocus-pocus and the surreal.

Some people are just naturally funny and love to pull pranks. When I was a Cub Scout, I read something about how to make a “crystal radio.” It required a coil of copper wire wrapped around the cardboard tube from a roll of toilet paper, a nine-volt battery, a small speaker and a galena crystal. Since I had a pretty extensive rock collection, I happened to have a galena crystal and easily found all the other component parts. I assembled the whole thing on Daddy’s desk, as the men waiting on haircuts watched with great anticipation.

Finally, I announced that I was about to hook up the wires and turn the jury-rigged contraption on. Just as I was preparing to hook the wires to the battery, one of the men slipped around behind the barber chair where a big RCA radio sat on the shelf among the bottles of hair tonic. At the same instant that I touched the bare copper wires to the battery, he turned the knob and Loretta Lynn started blaring out, “I was born a coal miner’s daughter…” This is the part where I learned about humility – the art of appreciating a good-natured joke, even when it’s on me.

Dennis Chastain is a Pickens County naturalist, historian and former tour guide. He has been writing feature articles for South Carolina Wildlife magazine and other outdoor publications since 1989.

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