High Priced Fruit Bowl

You young people probably don't know but getting your hair cut once a week (usually on Saturday morning) was a real necessity in the 1940's and 1950's. When I think about it I don't know how the barbers were able to handle the hoard of customers showing up during the sixteen hours they were open. You had to wait. There was no getting somebody to hold your place while you ran out for a coke or lunch or anything. I can't begin to tell you all the stories I heard and all the life's lessons I learned while sitting in the hard steel chairs waiting for my clippings. I always went to Harbie Benston's shop. Except for one Saturday when I was working on my granddaddy's old Buick and let the time slip by. I was always good at changing the oil and stuff like that and granddaddy would give me a quarter or maybe even fifty cents for doing the work. Haircuts back then were fifty cents and I was always glad for the extra money to help pay for my weekly spruce up. But this one Saturday that happened to be the day of a big school dance, I goofed up. By the time I got to the barber shop the chairs were all filled and they had put up a sign: No More Customers Today. I remembered a little barber shop down by the railroad tracks that was run by a man named Reaves Rentlowe. He was the only barber and he charged just a quarter for a cut. I figured I had no choice. That night at the dance I noticed how everybody was staring at me and snickering up a storm. Finally Billy Jazbrow got me off to the side and told me my hair looked like somebody had taken a high priced fruit bowl, put it on my head, and used it as a guide to trim my hair. The next week I got on the train and went to New Orleans and bought me a pair of barber scissors. They cost me twelve dollars. Since then, to this day, I cut my own hair. I still went to the barber shop, but just for the stories. They were so busy they didn't seem to mind losing my business.