George Leigh and Earl Newberger
by Ron Nachbor
In Herman, at the time of my youth, we had two barbershops (the beauty shops were located in the homes of various towns' women). George Leigh and Earl Newberger each had their own shop. The two men were similar in age and both were Veterans of World War I.
As a small boy, my first haircuts came from George's shop. George and his wife Ruby lived on the same block as we did and my parents were friendly with the Leighs so that was the barber shop that I was sent to. I can remember sitting on a bench that George had built. He inserted it into the barber chair. This bench had two sides to it. The thing was long enough to sit on the arms of the barber chair and this put you at just the right height, when very small, for George to get at your head. A sign of growing up was the day that you went to George and he flipped the bench over so that this flat side sat directly on the seat of the barber chair. This reverse side was a padded seat that was built up from the board so you still were elevated from the seat but only the extra six inches that George needed to get at you, not the ten to twelve inches that he got when you were propped on the bench across the arms. It was a rite of passage to have that thing flipped over somewhere around six or seven years old so you can imagine how important it made you feel when George told you: "I don't think that you need to sit on the bench at all any more." George's shop was very small and it always seemed that his line of chairs were full of waiting customers. I knew that he didn't like it if I showed up on a Saturday for a haircut because his business, that day, was arriving from "the country," so I usually went in after school. But . . . I still had to wait. He had a plain lined school tablet that he recorded your name on so there would be no argument as to who came next from those seats against the wall. The pencil (always a leaded pencil) was kept in a piece of birch branch with the white bark still on it. The wood had a number of holes that had been bored into it, big enough to hold the pencils. That pencil holder always fascinated me and George promised to make me one but he never did.
I killed time, waiting for my haircut, by sweeping the floor. I liked to sweep up all that hair that he had cut; it made you feel like you had done something when you got done with the project. Besides, I thought it made George happy and that is why I really did it but I always made sure that there would be some reading time too because George had the best comic books in town.
When I was very little, I had extremely curly, long, blond hair and George cut it off! I don't think that my mother ever forgave him.
As I grew older I got a paper route. George Leigh was not one of my customers but Earl Newberger was so I felt that Earl should have my business. Now this didn't make Earl rich and George poor, because I changed my allegiance from one to the other, but I always felt a little guilty about it whenever I saw George. Earl had a much larger shop, again with a row of chairs against the wall that were usually filled with customers. In the center of the shop was a big table that was covered with magazines and newspapers and a few comic books that I hadn't read over at George's. To me, though, it was a shop for an "older man" and now that I had this business of my own, delivering newspapers, I felt I fit that mold. So Earl cut my hair right up to high school graduation and I sat in Earl's shop through my high school years reading True Magazine as opposed to comic books and I didn't sweep his floor. On one of my visits to his shop, I told Earl that we were putting on "Our Town" as our Junior Class Play and needed some props from "well some of the older people in town." Earl got his wife Mary to hunt up some ostrich plumes and other things in their attic for us to use and then the Newbergers attended the play to see how we were using those things... I was honored that they would come.
.
Oh, by the way, I got over my guilt about changing my allegiance to Earl when, one day, I passed Earl's shop and there sat George Leigh in Earl's chair getting his hair cut.
To read more of Ron's stories click on any or all of the names below.
Bill Norman
Nels H. Nelson
Dr. and Mrs. Walter Smedley
Clarence Andrews
