Aug 29, 20132 min
When he opened way back in 1970, there were a full five barbers operating in Morris. Dave recollects a time of 11 in Morris, plus two more in neighboring Hancock and one in neighboring Chokio. According to Ronald S. Barlow, in his book The Vanishing American Barber Shop, the varied services offered by American barber shops accounts for their early proliferation.
There was a time when the saddle-weary stranger could ride into any town, dirty, smelly, sunburned, bewhiskered and hungry, with less than a dollar in his pocket and be welcomed to the sign of the bloodstained pole. Within an hour’s time he would be bathed, shorn, shaved, perfumed and manicured, have his boots shined, his mustache curled and his pants pressed. Some barber shops even offered customers a mug of beer and a free cigar!
A traditional indication of a barber is a window bijouterie; a display of trinkets in a barber shop, such as a bust of a woman with beautifully coiffed hair, a ceramic bear holding a card advertising products like “James Atkinson’s Bear Grease,” canes combs, beard styling combs, mustache waxes, creams, fanciful blue tonics and perhaps shampoos.
Dave’s Barber Shop’s “bijouterie” consists of Swedish and Norwegian “Bowling Balls” (two and three-holed painted bricks), golf balls in egg cartons, golf clubs, and Norwegian joke books. Where advertisements of the latest hairstyles might normally be hung, a poster of Moe, Larry and Curly, not exactly paragons of tonsorial taste, greet the customer.
Immediately after graduating from the Brooks School of Barbering in Saint Paul in 1969 (it had a 10-month-long waiting list then; now the school is closed due to lack of business), Dave practiced barbering in the Twin Cities’ western suburbs of Golden Valley, Brooklyn Center and St. Louis Park. Before barbering, he dabbled in hauling livestock and constructing guard rails. His tonsorial initiation came at 16 when his brother bought a pair of clippers. “He woke me up at six in the morning and said ‘Give me a hair cut.’ I’m glad he wasn’t too finicky.” From that point on he found himself flooded with requests and gave unlicensed haircuts anywhere from grocery to hardware stores.
Barbering school taught him about bones, muscle groups, such as omibyoiseud and triangularus (“Big words for a Norwegian,” he jokes. “You’ve got to be a doctor to get your license.”) and the inner workings of the nervous and digestive systems.
In spite of being from the small town of Sunburg (where “they still talk Norwegian in the cafe”), he has visited Alaska, northern Canada, Scandinavia, California, even Costa Rica, where one of his sons used to live. Even with all the challenges to the profession, Dave has no plans of retiring soon. And who better to keep the “B.S.” in barber shop?
Special thanks to The Vanishing American Barber by Ronald S. Barlow (available as reading material while waiting for a haircut), previous articles, “Barber Dave, The talk of the Town” by Aaron Gruber, appearing in The University Register (University of Minnesota, Morris), January 18, 1996, “Sunspot: Dave Evenson” by Marshall Hoffman, appearing in The Morris Sun Tribune, October 17, 2009, and, of course, Dave himself for two decades of haircuts and colorful quotes.