EDITOR’S NOTE: Much of this is reprinted from my column of Dec. 18, 2014
I was sad to lea
rn of the death this week of Joe Booker, a very popular Wayland barber for many years.
Booker, from Muskegon, bought the Brinkert hair cutting business right next to the old Wayland Globe (Helmey) building on East Superior Street in December 1964.
Though he was a devout Christian and supporter of George C. Wallace in 1968, he became my “poster boy” for the notion that you must adapt to ever-changing conditions or perhaps tomorrow you will no longer exist. It is a critical principle of Charles Darwin in his “Origin of Species,” published more than 150 years ago and still widely hated by religious folks in the United States.
Booker back in the day was just one of many barbers in the Wayland area, typically serving older men who would get haircuts on weekday mornings and boys and younger men who would come in for Saturdays or weekday afternoons.
But when the fad of younger guys wearing their hair long exploded on the scene, many barbers reacted with disdain. I remember all too often barbers and their older male customers in the late ‘60s beckoning us long-haired hippie types to come in so they could make us look like men again. We were frightened and didn’t darken their doorsteps ever again.
It didn’t happen overnight, but the old-style barber pole hair emporiums began to die. Within 20 years, it was difficult to find such a business, except perhaps in small backwoods communities.
Meanwhile, Joe Booker thrived in the business of cutting hair. He seemed to have experienced an epiphany in the early 1970s, in which he welcomed all the long-haired hippie creeps into his shop and began to sell them on the idea of “styling” long hair instead of forcing on them a crew cut or buzz cut. He had a gift of gab and a pleasant personality and he made everybody comfortable.
Joe Booker seemed to live by the creed, once sung by Frank Zappa, “Who cares if hair is long or short or sprayed or partly grayed, we know that hair ain’t where it’s at.”
Joe captured the young men’s business and he flourished, moving out to a much larger fa
cility in Wyoming (the King’s Room) and then later establishing hair cutting schools in West Michigan. Other barbers were going belly up, as their customer base was shrinking.
Today, the tonsorial arts are dominated by females and hair salons are notoriously for both men and women customers. The old-style barbers have gone the way of dinosaurs.
I interviewed a barber going out of business in Allegan in the fall of 1987 and he angrily blamed his misfortune on the Beatles, and over the last 20 years younger men took to wearing their hair long as a result. He said the long hairs didn’t come as often, if at all, and the older men with short hair were dying.
His inability to survive actually was tied to his inability to adapt to meet the wants and needs of his customers. I shed no tears for him as he closed up his shop.
The same kinds of things happened to the gas station jockey and the classic milk man. Both were doing jobs that anybody can do, so eventually anybody will. We now pump our own gas, we go to the store to buy milk. We go to fast-food restaurants and serve ourselves as waiters and then clean up our tables as busboys. At grocery stores, except Harding’s, we carry out our purchases ourselves.
In my line of business, the custom of getting your newspaper delivered to your home is coming to the same end. Most people nowadays get their news from television or the Internet.
When businesses and governments understand they cannot remain stagnant in a changing world and they need to be proactive rather than reactive, they do things like Joe Booker did. They pay attention to what’s happening around them and adapt in order to survive.
Yet even Joe Booker’s good fortune in 2014 came to an end. He sold his King’s Room barber shop in Wyoming and his barbering school. It wasn’t very long before the whole operation went the way of the milk man, the gas station jockey and the barber pole.
RIP, Joe Booker. You were a good man and a smart business man.
Joe Booker practiced free market capitalism – the opportunity with freedom and liberty to make a successful business, which he did. Darwinism doesn’t even come in to play – he read the” tea leaves” and understood what he had to do to expand his clientele base and business. Besides, the “long hairs” (of which I was one at the time) were looking for someone to service their needs, which Joe did. Some of us grew up and either lost our hair to heredity traits or got tired of trying to manage the mane. But some people never grow up or change hairstyles.
When I moved to the Wayland area in the early 80’s I was told by a co-worker to go see Joe at the King’s Room. I was told the only barber left in Wayland only knew one hair cut. Joe told me he moved to Wyoming in the mid-70’s when gas prices skyrocketed. He said customers wouldn’t drive to Wayland anymore so he moved to them. He was also the first shop in Michigan to pay his staff an hourly rate with benefits instead of a chair rental and commissions. He pulled in a lot of qualified long-term staff with that philosophy. He was a very good businessman.