Adjustment lessons learned from a tale of 2 late barbers

ACHTUNG: This is not a “fair and balanced” article. It is an editorial by the editor.

Charles Darwin taught us well more than a century and a half ago that those unable to adapt to changing conditions will become extinct or irrelevant. Too often we haven’t listened.

I thought about this once again when I learned this week about the death of Robert Hoyt, longtime Allegan Township Supervisor and local barber.

It was about 32 years ago when I dropped in on Hoyt to write a feature story on his retirement from the barbering business. The first thing he said to me was, “You’re looking at a dinosaur.”

When I asked what he meant by that, he told the sad story about how the old classic male barber shops with the pole outside have been disappearing from the landscape. And he blamed the Beatles.

He explained that when the four mop tops from Liverpool became famous suddenly in 1964, many American lads began to take up the longer hair styles and did not see the need or even the want to avail themselves of the tonsorial arts.

The old barber shops that gave patrons a shave and a haircut were declining in popularity and more importantly in revenue. Too many young fellas did not want to get the once-manly crew cut or buzz cut, and instead let their hair grow long.

So Hoyt maintained the Beatles led traditional American barbershops to ruin because of loss of business, and eventually shops owned and operated by him and others like him went belly up, as he was doing in the fall of 1987.

I didn’t buy into his theory entirely. One reason is that a significant number of male youths since the late 1970s has gone back to wearing shorter hair. Another trend is that females have cut into the once male-dominated business. So females are better at cutting hair?

Not so fast.

I remember all too well one of the most successful barbers, Joe Booker, who plied his trade on East Superior Street in downtown Wayland, right smack next door to the Globe, the Helmey building.

Joe Booker got religion in hair cutting in early 1972. He decided to change with the times and aggressively courted young men with longer hair, imploring them to style those long locks. Not only did the move salvage his small barbering business, it also promoted him eventually to move to Grand Rapids and establish the King’s Room in Rogers Plaza. Afterward, he started his own barbering school, the Booker Institute of Cosmolegy, and was really quite successful. He sold his businesses in 2014 and died in Florida in 2016.

In a nutshell, Joe Booker made the necessary adjustments to stay alive in the business and to avoid what so many of his colleagues suffered, shutting their doors. Booker still offered the haircut styles for the “manly men,” but he featured the exciting new service for the younger set.

These two men set an up-close and personal example of the Darwin-like theory that those who are able to adapt to changing conditions will survive. Those who choose to stay the course will become extinct.