LUBE JOBS AND HAIR CUTS
By: Robert L. Friedly
Photo By: Robert L. Friedly
Jim Hammond is a genuine slice of Hoosier and Irvington Americana. He runs the barber shop part of the tire repair and tonsorial parlor on the north side of Washington at Layman. Jim is 75, a recovering alcoholic and stroke victim, and has a bit of a shaky hand but he can do the job, and he may say to you afterwards, “Oh, give me five dollars” (He may charge more for people who actually have hair). Jim — or Jimmy B as his barber’s license puts it — has cut hair in that same Irvington block for half a century. He has trimmed everybody from one of the pharmaceutical Lillys — he can’t remember which one — to missionaries and other international luminaries of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), formerly domiciled on South Downey Avenue. On cold days he trudges in wearing his thermal boots and serape, and, peering out from under a black hood, plops into a chair at 8 a.m., after dropping a daughter off at work. He starts warming himself in front of a glowing space heater in the middle of the shop. He sits and talks. And talks. There is a printed slogan on the wall, above a barber chair with a couple of rips in the fabric. The sign reads: “It’s too bad that the people who really know how to run the country are busy driving cabs and cutting hair.” Actually, Jim doesn’t have too many opinions about running the country or the world. “God takes care of that,” he says. He concentrates more on the old days. In those days his dad, who was a barber before him in North Manchester, Indiana, charged 25 cents for a haircut, then raised the price a staggering 40 percent to 35 cents. “We didn’t even have a telephone in those days. Or a radio. Maybe we did have a radio. I can remember listening to Fibber McGee and Molly.” Jim used to have four barbers working for him in Irvington. “I really wanted to be a farmer,” he says. “But even then it cost too much money to go into farming.” For a time he was on the south side of Washington, where the new Irvington branch of the public library now sits. He has had two or three northside locations in that same block. He doesn’t have much truck with things modern. “I don’t know anything about websites,” he says casually about the Irvington Historical Society vehicle for which he was being interviewed. “I’m an eyeball to eyeball person.” A patron comes into the shop. “I need a haircut, Jim.” And even though it is not yet 11 in the morning, he responds, “Aw, I’m just getting ready to go home.” “I only need a trim,” the prospective customer pleads. “Okay,” he relents easily. He slips out of his poncho, ambles behind the chair and picks a barber’s cloth from the floor — the floor being liberally sprinkled with globs of hair, and gets his scissors and razor from the sink. The shop looks probably like it did 30 years ago, old furniture sitting around, including an antique barber chair — dating to 1880, Jim says, and a couple of theater chairs. The antique chair has a child’s barber seat across the arms and a luxury upholstery that looks like flocking. There are cups and ball caps scattered about on the window sills, pictures of the kids and grandkids, and half-smoked cigars. A dusty construction hard hat sits atop a piece of furniture, as if to demarcate the line between the labor of the auto repair and the more refined effort of haircutting. There is a book about Bobby Plump on the counter. He didn’t know the guy who made the state championship winning shot, inspiring the movie Hoosiers, but he thinks he played ball with guys who were just as good. “There is a lot of luck in that kind of thing (winning state championships),” he says. Jim was captain of his high school basketball team and he thinks he might have made a pretty good college player but all he thought about at that time was getting a job. Jim went to barber college fresh out of high school, then joined the Navy and practiced barbering on the aircraft carrier Roosevelt, out of Norfolk and in the Mediterranean. “A ship that big was like a city. You didn’t even know you were moving.” But now days he doesn’t really make a living at barbering. He comes into the shop weekday mornings mainly so he has a place to hang out and chat with friends. He lives in a free apartment in the Irvington United Methodist Church, in the circle on North Audubon, where he says he is kind of a “building manager,” cutting the grass and taking out the trash for a small income. In the evening he also works for Alcoholics Anonymous at an AA location near Washington and Franklin Road, proud of the fact that he has been sober more than a quarter century. About eight years ago Jim had a stroke. It left him gimpy on the left side, both in the arm and leg. But the right hand is the one that holds the razor. “In the old days,” he says, “it made you feel kind of important when you could walk into the barber shop and get all lathered up and get a shave. It was like having gold teeth. That was a sign of having money.” Jim has an ex-wife and two daughters and a son and law that live in the neighborhood, and a daughter in Bloomington as well as a 90-plus-year-old mother. He looks back at his life and says he can’t get too judgmental about other people. He knows what it is to struggle with alcohol and he says he has been unable to keep his weight under control. “I can’t come down on other people much.” Another sign in the shop underscores his perspective on life: “If people really concentrated on the important things, there would be a severe shortage of fishing poles!” |
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