BERNARDSTON — With its reupholstered vintage barber chair and linen closet that doubles as a bathroom, Streeter’s Barbershop on Route 10 in Bernardston is modeled after an old-fashioned barbershop, a kind that barber John Rogers says is becoming increasingly rare in the business. Rogers has a book in the shop called “The Vanishing Barbershop,” which he uses as a model for Streeter’s.
“It’s got a lot of pictures, and quite a few of them resemble the same setup we’ve got in here,” Rogers said.
The barbershop is a small, white shack that is dwarfed by the Kringle Candle factory a few hundred yards uphill behind it. The building was originally the office space for a Pontiac dealership in Greenfield. (The dealership’s old location, on Federal Street near Silver Street, is now a Honda dealership.) In the early 1960s, Rogers said, the Streeter family bought the building and had it relocated to Bernardston to house the barbershop, which at the time shared space with the Streeter Store, in the building that is now Hillside Pizza.
Rogers, now 88, has been working at Streeter’s Barbershop since 2001. He was born in Greenfield and grew up in Colrain, then moved to Wilmington, Vt., when he was 28. He held several different jobs over the years, but always kept haircutting as a “trade to fall back on.” For a few years in the early ’60s, he operated what he says was the first mobile barbershop in the country — a pickup truck rigged to a trailer that housed a whole barbershop. Rogers brought his mobile business to several towns around Wilmington, Vt.
In 1991, Rogers and his wife moved from Vermont to Mississippi, where they thought they would retire.
“We didn’t do anything for a couple of months, and pretty quick we were chomping at the bit,” he said. “We were both in our 60s. That’s too young to just stop.”
Rogers bought a barbershop and hired a young barber to work with him.
“I got him going so he would have a little more confidence,” Rogers said. ” I would just work a few days a week. He’d call me up and tell me he was really busy. I said, ‘Can you handle it?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I’m handling it.’ … So I sold it to him and came up here.”
Now, the customers at Streeter’s Barbershop are mostly regulars who are loyal to either Rogers or Jim Farnam, now the other barber at the shop. Farnam, who is 89, declined to be interviewed for this story.
“The haircuts have changed,” Rogers said. “Most of the places that teach the barbers are teaching them more towards hairstyling and that type of thing. That’s an entirely different thing. It used to be a sort of passage, that the man would take his kid with him to the barbershop, and he’d get into it that way and get into the habit of going to the barber. … At a certain point most guys stopped using the straight razor. They said the insurance wouldn’t be covered, but it was just a cop-out as far as I could see. They just didn’t want to bother doing it.”
Asked why he continues to cut hair, Rogers says he enjoys the work and having some money coming in isn’t a bad thing, either.