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Dulling the blade
Straight-edge shaves have become rare
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FarkEven after seeing director Tim Burton’s movie musical “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” most customers aren’t nervous about exposing their jugulars to local barbers. That’s because getting a shave is nearly impossible in Rapid City.
In the movie set in the 1800s, Johnny Depp plays a barber seeking vengeance after he is wrongfully imprisoned and his family destroyed. He engineers a trap door at the head of his barber’s chair, which he tips after using his straight-edge razor to slit the throats of customers who have wronged him, sending the bodies to a basement where they are cut up and sold as mincemeat pies.
At certain intervals to break the tension in this gruesome tale, Sweeney Todd bursts into song.
It is as likely for one of the barbers to break into song as it is to get an old-fashioned shave at a Rapid City barber shop. While each shop visited recently sported a barber pole, which once symbolized a barber’s profession of bloodletting, it no longer means a steam and shave are available within the shop.
A broken headrest on his barber chair keeps Earl Grabowski from sharpening his straight-edge razor. While he does have visions of setting up a temporary chair at the Sturgis motorcycle rally offering shaves and haircuts to motorcyclists returning home, he is still in the initial stages of planning.
Grabowski, 45, receives requests for shaves three or four times a month, mostly from women who want their husbands or boyfriends to get a facial shave.
“It’s a dying art. People are in too much of a hurry to have a shave,” Grabowski said as he clipped the hair of an early-morning customer.
Grabowski recalls enjoying the atmosphere of barber shops while growing up. On the shelves of the shop he frequented were shaving mugs of the barber’s customers with their names printed on the side. The barber also had his own horse-hair soap brushes, used to spread lather on the cheeks, chin, jaw and neck. The separate mug and brush were a way to keep customers from spreading skin diseases.
“Those days are gone,” Grabowski said.
Female barbers Lynn Turner and Davie Cribari of Rustic Razor were each methodically cutting hair of two gentlemen to the hum of their clippers as several more customers read newspapers or magazines in a row of chairs pushed against the west wall.
On the opposite wall in a display case, an impressive array of straight-edge razors with a variety of carved handles was lined up for exhibit. Sitting on the case were four or five shaving mugs and several horse-hair brushes with varying lengths of bristles.
They are definitely authentic, antique, pristine and no longer used.
“We don’t mess with it anymore,” Davie Cribari said of shaving beards.
Cribari and Turner both had to shave customers’ beards as part of their master barber licensing exams; both recall shaving customers early in their careers. But since the two opened Rustic Razor in 1999, they opted to drop the once standard practice.
“We did get a call this week,” Turner said of a request for a shave.
“I probably could do one now, but I would be such a nervous wreck trying not to cut them,” she added.
They said it would take them at least 20 minutes to a half-hour to shave one customer, using a steam towel to loosen the pores, applying lather, shaving, then using a cool towel and aftershave lotion. In that time, they could have made more money cutting hair.
Also, diseases such as AIDS and HIV that are transferred through blood and other body fluids would require more than a shaving pencil to deal with a cut or nick.
“Because of health issues, some states don’t allow (shaving) anymore,” Cribari said.
South Dakota isn’t among those states.
The state still allows shaving, according to Bob Johnson of West Main Barber Shop.
The Rapid City barber and state examiner planned to travel to Pierre last Monday for a licensing exam for a new barber. Asked what he watched for when the new barber worked out a shaving technique, Johnson was succinct: “Blood.”
Johnson, licensed since 1962, and Sandra Dietterle both have worked as barbers since 1985 in Baken Park, moving in 2003 to their West Main shop. Both ceased shaving customers years ago, although Johnson will give a shave on rare occasions and under special circumstances.
“We don’t do enough to keep in practice,” he said.
They used to do a brisk business in shaving, massages and even facials, Johnson said.
“We used to use mud packs, spreading this clay all over their faces and then covering it with a steam towel until it dried,” he said. “Those were fun.”
But by the time they had finished a shave, several haircuts would have been missed.
“You can’t make any money when you’re giving a shave,” he said.
The Wall native recalls barber shops as places where everyone talked about their hunting stories. One of his first chairs was in a shop in a Philip hotel, where down the hallway was a bathroom with a tub.
On Saturday nights when a dance was held in the 1960s, Johnson would open the shop at 8 a.m. and men from the country would line up for a haircut, a shave and a soak in the tub. The regular closing time would come and go without notice.
“They’d keep coming until intermission of the dance,” Johnson said. “I couldn’t pick up my date until halfway through the dance.”
At Monday’s exam, Johnson planned to watch for certain strokes, make sure the barber has followed a system and also finished within the required amount of time.
“Then I’ll check to see how many whiskers are left. Especially around the lips or under the nose,” he said.
“It’s about the only time you see a shave around here,” Johnson added.
Contact Jomay Steen at 394-8418 or jomay.steen@rapidcityjournal.com.
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