The Kindest Cut

When Barbicide is not an option

Taking your son to the barber shop for the first time is a Dad thing.

Holding a 7-to-3 job on the assembly line at NCR during the week, I’m certain my Dad initiated me on a Saturday morning. The barber was named Remo, and he worked at the Cornell Barber Shop, below street level at the corner of State and Aurora Streets in Ithaca, N.Y.

There was some anxiety involved— from the intimate proximity of the scissors, to the too-tight strip of thin paper wrapped around my neck, held with a clip, to keep the hair out of my shirt—so I have vivid memories of the experience.

Disembodied heads in a black and white poster sported different cuts: the Forward Brush, the Professional, the Ivy League, the Business Men’s, the Butch, the Crew Cut, the Flat Top and the Flat Top with Fenders. Fenders? Cornell man that he was, Dad chose the Ivy League, which seemed to part on the left.

There was the smell of the Pinaud Clubman hair tonic, plus the talcum powder poured into a big, soft brush and applied liberally around my face and neck. There were displays of Ajax unbreakable pocket combs and Trim fingernail clippers, and the tall jar of comb-disinfecting blue liquid called Barbicide (Jerry Seinfeld later claimed that barbers drank it when they couldn’t take being a barber anymore).

Remo was strictly a scissor and comb guy. He apprenticed in Italy during World War II and came to the U.S. in 1957. When he arrived in upstate New York, he apprenticed without pay for another two years at a place called Solomon’s. His brother Benny ran a restaurant and decided to go to barber school, later opening his own shop, where Remo worked. When Benny decided he liked the restaurant business better, Remo took over.

In that “Mad Men” era, it was common for guys to keep their hair shiny and under control with products like Brylcreem. It was described as “an emulsion of water and mineral oil, stabilized with beeswax.” I was too young to care much about it, but I do have an extraordinary memory of a TV commercial from the day: a woman in a skin-tight evening gown rises out of a giant tube of Brylcreem and practically oozes up some bespeckled sap’s shoulders, digging her delicate hands into his oily head.

Not putting too fine a point on it, another ad showed a man setting a romantic dinner table for two: himself, and a tube of Brylcreem. On cue, a woman in another evening gown rises out of the tube, and he goes pop-eyed as she heads for his greasy pate again. “I could tell by her eyes that she’d flipped for clean, natural looking hair,” he thinks to himself.

Brylcreem’s advertising slogan was, “a little dab’ll do ya,” just enough to keep your hair “excitingly clean and disturbingly healthy.” Yes, its effect on women was so overpowering that its use had to be strictly regulated. “This impetuous fellow used two dabs—now he’s in a trouble,” says the stentorian announcer in another ad, as a woman flings herself into the heedless fellow’s arms. “As a public service, we’d like to caution all serious men to use just a little dab.”

Nowadays dabs are more about weed than hair cream, and serious men like Snoop Dogg wouldn’t dream of doing just a little one.

Still, when you grow up in a small town, it’s possible to go back and find people like the guy who performed your first haircut.

When I returned, in my 40s, Remo was still there, white-haired and down to working a day or two a week. The black and white floor tiles, the embossed tin ceiling and the sweet barbershop aromas remained unchanged. There was a cast iron coat rack, a gold NCR cash register on an oak base, and old straight razors, now in a display case, including one from 1928. Remo was stoop-shouldered and leaned his face close to the back of my neck while he shaved it. He remained a scissor and comb guy. 

There were bare fluorescent bulbs above the original, wall-length mirror that at one time captured the image of my tiny self. Back then, I was excitingly clean and disturbingly healthy.  

I sat there, reflecting.

© 2022 David Potorti