Longtime barber shop stays sharpFriday, February 4, 2011
BY CHARLES ERICKSON
Hackensack Chronicle
CORRESPONDENT
HACKENSACK — The second owner of Louis’s Barber Shop is not certain of what year the business was opened. Some people have told Frank Blair that it was 1940. Others have stated that haircutting did not commence at 653 Main St. for another eight years.
Frank Blair bought Louis’s Barber Shop from Louis Durante in 2005. He is only the second owner of the Hackensack haircutter, which opened in the 1940s. Durante died at age 96 in 2007.
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"So, we’ll split the difference and say that it was around ’45," Blair said recently after closing time on a Saturday afternoon. "We know that it wasn’t yesterday."
There are three porcelain barber chairs, each made by Chicago’s Emil J. Paidar Company. They apparently were pre-owned when the shop opened.
"I’ve got a guy who comes in here who worked for them," Blair said. "He told me these chairs are from about 1936."
Leather straps dangle from each chair. Barbers would run straight razors over the straps to remove any burrs. The first owner and shop’s namesake, Louis Durante, offered shaves but Blair limits his services to haircuts.
Frank Blair planned to quit the barbering business and move to Virginia, but then the met Louis Durante in 2004 and bought the business the following year. Trade is off about 20 percent from five years ago, but Blair says the shop is turning a small profit.
There is also a barber pole in the shop. Originally wound by hand, like a giant watch, it was later converted to electric power. The light still works, but the motor is not operational and the pole is stationary.
"It was outside until a cop car backed up and knocked it over, and then they brought it inside," Blair said. "That’s what I was told."
Blair did not expect to be working in Hackensack, and is surprised he is still cutting hair in 2011.
He once made his living as a welder, including in the United States Navy, but left the trade because the fumes began to affect his breathing. In 2000 he enrolled at the Parisian Beauty Academy in Hackensack. He is licensed by the state to cut hair, work on nails and perform other beauty aesthetics. Blair’s license is no different from those issued to the ladies who work in salons.
In early 2004, Blair quit his job at the Lodi branch of a national haircutting chain and decided to move to Virginia. He was going to work at a shipyard as a welder. He missed the act of joining sheets of metal.
"But I found that you needed money before you can move," Blair said. He then heard that Louis Durante was looking for a barber at his shop in Hackensack.
Blair made a visit. Durante was 94 at the time, and he was cutting the hair of a 95-year-old customer. Two nurses were also there, helping both men.
"And I said, ‘Oh my God, I can’t do this,’ " Blair recalled about his initial impressions of an enterprise where everything seemed ancient. "This is a place where barbers come to die.’"
Durante began telephoning Blair after the visit to extend him offers of employment. Despite his hesitancy to work at a living museum, Blair needed a job and began cutting hair at Louis’s in March 2004.
Business was slow. "When I came in, I was doing one, two haircuts a day," Blair said. "It was bad."
Blair stayed on at Louis’s Barber Shop, and took over the operation in early 2005. Louis Durante died in April 2007, aged 96.
Revenues are off about 20 percent from 2006, Blair said. He considers the year after his purchase of the shop to be the time when business was best.
Haircuts cost $12 for adults, with senior citizens getting a $10 rate. Prices are unchanged from 2005.
Cutting hair in Hackensack, working for himself, Blair has more freedom than he did when he was linked to that chain in Lodi. But there is more responsibility, and a requirement that he smile when a customer enters the shop five minutes before closing time.
"You’ve got to be a little bit more disciplined, which is something I’ve got to work at," Blair said. "You know, when it’s a nice day, warm out, it’s 5 o’clock and you want to go home and go fishing, or you want to go for a ride or something like that."
Motion picture companies have used the shop twice to shoot commercials since Blair assumed ownership, and he believes it was used for this purpose multiple times when Louis Durante was proprietor.
With the old barber chairs, cash register, rotary telephone and aged woodwork, the shop’s fixtures provide a type of authenticity that is loved by most location scouts.
In 2006, a production company filmed an entire commercial here for a New England bank. Blair never saw the completed product.
Two years later, a crew working for Disney used Louis’s Barber Shop to film portions of a commercial for that company’s theme parks. Blair has seen this film, and knows to look fast after it shows someone running through Grand Central Terminal as an announcer talks about life’s poignant moments.
"And all of a sudden, it shows this little red-headed kid getting a haircut," Blair said, "in this barbershop for, like, three seconds, and that’s it."
