My daughter Lucy tries to create a new adventure for her two-and-a-half-year-old twins, every day. I know. I’d be exhausted, too. That’s why people typically don’t become parents in their seventies. But when the weather last Wednesday scuttled her plans to take Aggie and Faye for a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge Lucy decided to get them their first haircuts.
My daughter invited me to join them, knowing my own consequential childhood relationship to hair. A first haircut is a rite of passage, one’s “Graduation from Babyhood” as the souvenir card documenting my first haircut, with a vaguely creepy snippet of hair in a cellophane envelope duly attached, noted. I still possess the memento thought I have no recollection of the occasion since it occurred at approximately the age my grandchildren are today.
But the event was documented in my mother’s diary for February 14th (Valentine’s Day) 1955. The blessed event occurred at Michael’s barbershop — officially Michael’s Children’s Haircutting Salon. It was located at Madison Avenue and 90th Street. “Ralphie got his first haircut and looks very cute now, better than before,” my mother wrote. “He ate three lollipops and had a very good time.”
Her opinion regarding my appearance, both before and after my scalping, requires some context and not just because mothers notoriously overrate their children’s looks. I’ll address the situation regarding my mother, Nellie, and her fraught relationship to her four sons’ hair shortly.
Aggie and Faye, with their mother and me in tow, walked to Yellow Submarine, a neighborhood children’s barbershop, for their 10:30 appointment. (Their grandmother was to join us there.) The scene was very different than the one I recall at Michael’s, which closed its doors in 2002 after almost a century in business; perhaps because it was morning and we were the only customers. At Michael’s the after-school scene, when my three younger brothers, my mother and I, swarmed the shop was chaotic even before our arrival.
Young children were hoisted aboard raised toy firetrucks and police cars used to entice the tikes to get their locks cut without a struggle. Older children sat in one of the several conventional barber chairs; those lollipops their inducement to be good little boys and girls. There was also a stack of well-thumbed comic books to occupy them while they waited their turn; and in the case of our family after we got our hair cut but were forced to sit through our brothers coiffeurs.
The comics and lollipops often went together, sometimes literally. You could suck one while reading the other, but occasionally you’d eagerly open the latest issue of Superman, the Flash or the Green Lantern only to find the lollipop belonging to a previous reader stuck to the pages.
Yellow Submarine seemed a much smoother and more cleanly operation. Perhaps because germs weren’t top-of-mind back in the Fifties and Sixties. The salon’s yellow, blue, white and red barber chairs were ergonomic. They came with seat belts and steering wheels; though considering the submarine motif — video fish floated past a large porthole — I suppose we should be referring to it as the helm. I’m proud to report that not a single tear was shed. There wasn’t even any dispute about who got to get her hair cut first. Faye graciously deferred to Aggie.
But perhaps the biggest difference between then and now boiled down to parenting. Lucy doesn’t regard hair in need of cutting as the existential threat to her children’s appearance that my mother did. And if Nellie hated anything more than long hair it was long curly hair, for reasons that are too psychologically fraught to explore at the moment. Unfortunately, most of her children had lots of curls. Aggie and Faye’s hair is straight and blond.
To combat our curls my mother devised an otherworldly hairdo that made her children look like members of some obscure cult. In effect we were. Each of us had identical crewcuts that Nellie insisted Mr. Michael cut almost to our scalps with a scissors while she watched over him. Our initial stylist was Mr. Gay, operating out of chair #2, until he and my mother had a falling out. Mr. Gay had the temerity to suggest that much time and anguish could be saved by taking an electric razor to our heads since the end result was indistinguishable.
The problem, not that I’m defending my mother was that ours weren’t quite the buzz cuts standard for children of that era. Nellie’s invention was a crewcut plus a counterintuitive wave of hair that flopped across our foreheads. She referred to it as cowlick, though my understanding is that cowlicks are an unruly tuft on the top of the head. Her inspiration was Huck Finn, who she read about as a child in Europe. To her a cowlick was quintessentially American.
The only occasion when I managed to evade the barber’s scissors came during the blackout of 1965. The lights went out across the East Coast while my younger brother Johnny was in the barber’s chair. “Mr. Michael, the barber, got hold of a flashlight,” my mother wrote in her diary, “and finished Johnny’s haircut while I was holding the flashlight for him. Ralphie will have to come back another time.”
Our appearance became increasingly bizarre and out-of-step during the 1960’s as people started to grow their hair long. I finally rebelled at sixteen, forbidding my mother from accompanying me to the barber, and refusing to get my hair cut to her specifications any longer. Aggie and Faye have offered no such resistance, so far. They were perfect young ladies and were awarded for their behavior with a yellow helium balloon and a lock of their hair attached to a souvenir photo. I’m reasonably confident that whatever challenges they face in life their hair won’t rank high among them.
Ralph Gardner Junior is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found in the Berkshire Eagle and on Substack.
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