An Old Timer and a Memorable Shave

An Old Timer and a Memorable Shave

In which the late Meredith, New Hampshire Barber Jesse Allen takes to the face of a first-timer with hot lather and a straight razor.

By DEAN DEXTER

There was once a barber shop in the Town of Meredith run by an old timer. By old timer, I mean he must have been barbering for over 60 years, beginning in the 1920s. By the time I went into his shop on Main Street, one hot summer day for an old fashioned shave with a straight razor, he was in his 70s or 80s.

Soon we were talking politics, which I love to do. I had let my beard grow for three days, so it was good and prickly, scratchy.

“Yup, they come in here all the time when they’re running for office, and when they get elected you never see ‘em,” said Jesse Allen, while he lathered my face with hot foamy soap from an electric dispenser near the sink.

The public health police had long ago outlawed use of shaving mugs and brushes in barber shops. After hundreds of years, these simple tools of tonsorial gentility were now believed to be unsafe for modern man. Unsanitary, they said.

Old Allen had barbered my grandfather, and his father before him. As a young boy I would watch Jesse Allen cut gramp’s hair and shave him, not once but twice.

“They always shave you twice,” Gramp told me.

Who better than Jesse Allen to give me my first shave with a straight razor?

Old Allen would whip up the soap in a mug, while gramp’s face was covered with a hot towel. Then brush the thick soap across his face with a badger bristle.

“I like the machines, though, they give a better lather,” Allen said as he massaged the soap into my beard with his fingers, before drawing the dreadfully sharp blade in short little stokes across my cheeks, under my chin, and down along my neck. Yikes. Not long, quick stokes, like you see John Wayne or Humphrey Bogart do it in the movies, but short, careful strokes, wiping the soap away from the blade on a towel tucked in my collar.

But, all I could think about was the creepy “Sweeney Todd” who slit people’s throats in a play I had seen a week before at the Lakes Region Playhouse, long a popular stop on the summer stock circuit. The Gilford landmark, now gone, brought the likes of Groucho Marx, Mickey Rooney, Milton Berle, and the astonishingly buoyant, Jayne Mansfield, to Lakes Region audiences.

I remembered a story told by a nationally known politician at a conference I once attended, about the year he ran in the New Hampshire Presidential Primary, and how he walked into a New Hampshire barber shop one snowy day, to be greeted by a frowning group of patrons, waiting their turns to be clipped.

“Hello, I’m Congressman Mo Udall from the State of Arizona, and I’m running for president of the United States,” the droll candidate said.

Silence.

“Yes, we read about that in the newspaper, and were laughing about it this morning,” replied the old barber.” Udall told the story with a chuckle and got a good laugh.

My Friend, Brad Sprague, a fellow Belknap County Commissioner from Meredith, was at the conference with me.

We both looked at each other and said: “Jesse Allen?”

Well, maybe it was Jesse.

I’ll never forget those times when I went with my grandfather to Jesse Allen’s shop, filled with antique civil war rifles and sabers, military hats, and old shaving mugs. The place was always alive with talk and humor about the big issues of the day.

“Who’s that woman running for selectman? A woman selectman?” (Mary Robertson, the first Selectwoman in Meredith).

“Who in tarnation does the governor think he is, taking land from the farmers to build these big highways?” (Routes I-93 and NH-104).

“You know, in the old days, if someone wanted just a shave, we’d use a dull razor on him,” Jesse Allen told me.

“Why?”

“Because a shave was 25 cents, and a haircut was 50 cents, and we’d lose money on just a shave. Look at how long this is taking me. But don’t worry, this is a sharp razor.” Allen said.

“Thanks, I just always wanted to do this, and I figured you’re the expert.”

“Yup. Your grandfather was a good friend, Jesse Allen, said. “That will be five dollars.”

“Don’t I get a second shave?”

“We don’t do that anymore,” he said.

In the days when a good shave meant something. New Hampshire Senator Styles Bridges in 1939 was traveling the country drumming up support for a run for President in 1940. Eventually Wendell Willkie, a Wall Street lawyer and business executive, was the Republican nominee that year, against Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who won an unprecedented third term. Here Bridges is caught by an Akron, Ohio, newspaper photographer, in Willkie's home town, getting a first class lathering prior to his speech at a GOP Lincoln Day Dinner later that night.

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A version of this piece appeared in the August 14, 2010 edition of the Laconia Daily Sun

-- Posted August 17, 2010

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