Young fellas were trying to make money anyway they could during the Great Depression. For most, it involved hot sweaty labor in the fields. When the crop season ended so did many paying jobs. T.W. Jones, my father, developed another paying job. At 14, he started giving out free haircuts. As he got better, others came to him. When he began charging money, Daddy said his “business improved”. So, while doing the same work as other Cofield boys, he refined his barbering skills and added more change to his pockets with a chair, brush, comb and scissors.
My bush is getting reduced in the backyard
around 1980. Daddy
preferred the outdoor lighting.
I'm sitting on a wooden foot stool
placed on a chair. The cloth is same
one I knew twenty years earlier, and it
is still in the barber kit. You may
notice that it was getting time for T.W.
to visit Roy Marsh for his own trim.
During the school months, he set up in a store space donated by his friend, Delaware Jones (yes, a distant cousin). Once school was out, T.W. abandoned his understanding customers to work in New York, staying with his older brother, John Pat Jones, Jr. T.W. worked all kinds of jobs, including barbering. The start of school would find him back in Cofield. The understanding customers returned.
Hand Clippers made by Oster (of Osterizer fame)
and Commando. Each one
might be worth $35 somewhere. Better to keep them and the spare blades.
Waters Training School in Winton (later Calvin Scott Brown School) had a dormitory for boarding students back then. T.W. found an under-used room and, with somebody’s permission, set up a hair-cutting room. Because some boys cut classes while hiding out in the room, a teacher ordered Daddy to report to Dr. Calvin Scott Brown. Upon T.W.’s arrival, the conversation went something like this:
| Dr. Brown: “What
do you want? What are you here for?” And that’s how Daddy got his best-known customer. When he graduated in 1936, T.W. lost an important customer base. He and my mother married a year later. During that time, he worked at the Newport News shipyard and barbered at night in Briscoe’s Barber Shop. Almost 60 years later, he discovered that Briscoe’s was still in business. |
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When T.W.’s father-in-law’s health failed, he returned to Cofield and took over the farm - plowing in the day and clipping at night. One night, as he finished up with his last customer, T.W. had to deal with a drunken rowdy who was raging at the locked door. T.W. showed his customer out through the back door, and returned to the front. Daddy put a match to a string of firecrackers (Baby Wakers), opened the front door, and in a Looney Tunes-like moment, quickly shoved them into the man’s chest. T.W. locked up and exited through the back.
The John Oster Manufacturing Company is now part of Sunbeam and still makes hair clippers very similiar to this one T.W. bought in 1941. The power cord is crumbling but it still works well. |
| Daddy’s clipping-for-pay ended shortly after he bought one of Delaware Jones’ stores in 1946. He made a 35-year loan of his barber chair to his friend, Talmadge Reid, who had just returned from the War. T.W. kept his barbering skills up when he clipped for his sons and his father. He also traded cuts with Tal Reid. My first haircut of the New Millennium came from T.W. Jones with some of the tools you see here. |
Straight razors from a 75-year
career. I know little about |
