BRATTLEBORO, Vt. (AP) - The last barber shop in the town of Brattleboro might have to close.
And it’s not for lack of business at Mac’s Barber Shop on Putney Road.
Mary Jane Giroux has been giving haircuts and shaves to Brattleboro area men for 30 years and she wants to retire.
She turns 70 next March, but she can’t hire a barber to save the business she founded with her friend Christine Nadeau. Their initials make up the shop’s name. Nadeau passed away in 2005.
“We wanted something that sounded masculine,” she said.
Giroux says she and her daughter Anne Murphy are swamped with business, but that she cannot find someone to join the business. She said she is even willing to pay for the $15,000 tuition to send someone to barber school, which lasts 10 to 12 months, in exchange for a commitment. The closest barber school is two hours away from Brattleboro, she said.
“I could use two barbers,” she said. “We are very busy.” The shop also has a part-time barber, Michael West.
Giroux has tried the traditional methods of getting the word out, and has even offered a $1,000 “finder’s fee” to someone who could put her in touch with someone who would cut hair and give shaves at her shop.
Giroux runs a traditional shop, with an antique barber pole in the front window.
The closest school is in Massachusetts or New Hampshire, although the O’Brien Aveda Institute in Williston, a well-known cosmetology school, also has a barber curriculum.
Barber shops are different from hair salons, Giroux points out, and require “totally different licenses.”
“Very different skills,” said Giroux, who herself graduated from the Keene Beauty Academy.
At the barbering academy, she said, “you learn everything you need to know.”
For one, barbers don’t handle hair chemicals, such as coloring or permanents or straightening. They usually don’t offer shampoos, although they can.
They do “straight razor shaves and hot towels and hot lather,” she said. “We do neck shaves,” she said.
The most popular cut now is “The Fade,” she said.
“’Tight on the sides, longer on the top,’” she said.
They do beard trims and “line-ups,” she said.
Cosmetologists can’t use a razor, by license, and can only trim a beard or mustache using scissors.
On the other hand, barbers can’t do manicures.
“I have hundreds and hundreds of clients that depend on us,” she said. But many hands-on trades are dying, she said.
Barbers can make a good living, starting off early in the “high 20s, low 30s,” with tips extra. And there are a lot of female barbers, she said.
According to Giroux, they don’t charge as much as hair salons for a simple shave or haircut or both, because they work more quickly.
They trim eyebrows and nose hair, she said.
“We clean them up and we make them feel good,” she said. And they listen, a lot. “We’re a therapist for a lot of people,” she said.
Another barber shop tradition: It’s first-come-first-served, no appointments.
Brattleboro at one time supported five or six different barbershops, she said. She started work with Harold Mayhew, after raising her children.
Giroux came from a family of 16 children. “I’ve always worked hard. I was raised to work,” she said.
After graduating from St. Michael’s High School in Brattleboro, she got a job at The Book Press, “like everybody else.”
After her children were grown, she had to decide whether to go to nursing school or be a hairdresser.
After cosmetology school, she apprenticed with Mayhew, who ran “Harold The Barber” shop in downtown Brattleboro.
“I worked for him for years,” she said.
“It’s sad,” said Giroux, looking around her shop, which has four barber chairs, including one in the shape of a horse for children. There’s a Snoopy hairdryer on the stand.
“There’s so much potential.”
Closing the shop is something she doesn’t want to do.
“I couldn’t do that to the people in the town,” she said.
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Online: https://bit.ly/2FhMNAL
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Information from: Brattleboro Reformer, http://www.reformer.com/
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