Trott Talks Barbering

Theodore Trottier, Hanover's most outspoken barber, had a few things to say about the barber business while giving a haircut this fall:

I took over this shop in 1951 and I've been here ever since. Rent is probably what's going to push me out. It's getting higher every year more prohibitive. You can't make any money if you give it all to the landlord. That's what's the matter with Hanovgr now. The landlord is getting it all.

When I came here years ago there were ten or 15 barbers in town. There was more business when Dartmouth was 2,000 students than there is now. Everybody got a haircut every two weeks. They got haircuts like I'm wearing, a regular haircut. Anything that's hair over the ears we don't call a regular haircut. We call that hair styling. I do a lot of hair styling. I don't do many haircuts like the one I'm wearing anymore.

There's a radius here of about 25 miles from which I draw. I just got a haircut from Woodstock in front of you. I'm drawing from all the towns around here. I'd say students are about 40 per cent of my business. It used to be we had three barbers in here. This used to be a three-chair shop. In the fifties I had three barbers going full speed here. Three of them. Now there's just me. Some days there isn't enough business for one.

You never know how many haircuts you'll do in a day. Some days you'll sit here and you won't do any. Other days you'll do 15 or 20. You can't figure people in the barber business. You never know when they're coming. Sometimes their wives cut their hair. Home haircuts are cutting a big hole in our business. My business is gradually falling off. A lot of my steady customers who wore the old fashioned haircuts are dying off on me.

We made more money in the old days cutting hair for 50c than if we cut hair for $5 now. The 50c haircut and the SI haircut were our two best haircuts. A dollar was 20 ice cream cones, ten hamburgers. A dollar now isn't even one hamburger. It's $1.35 down to Lou's for one hamburger. The dollars we're getting now are worthless. The man who comes in here now and gives me $3.50 is really giving me about 350 for a haircut. The way the dollar's going I don't know if I'll stay in business. Maybe it's better to go on welfare.

The haircuts you fellows are wearing now are all Civil War haircuts. It looks like the Union and Confederate armies are in here trading now. The long, long hair came in during the early sixties when the Beatles came over. That precipitated the change. I like the long hair best because I get the most money out of it. I didn't have any trouble adjusting because my brother has a beauty academy in Keene. He just showed me one or two things. A lot of the haircuts men are wearing now are women's haircuts. There's no difficulty for me going from a man to a woman. I can do both. But I don't do children. I've discontinued children. They raise my blood pressure.

I just gave an $8 haircut ahead of you. That's my best haircut. It involves a shampoo, cutting, styling, and blow-drying. If the guy's not too talkative I can do it in about 25 minutes. I used to cut haircuts here in five minutes by the stopwatch when there was military training at Dartmouth. I gave military haircuts for a buck. It was the biggest money I ever made in my life. The dollar was good then. It's worthless now.

When I went to grammar school in the early twenties in Wilder, Vermont, my father was a barber and he had to have some help. So one day he said to me, "You're going to come in the shop after school and learn the barber business." I was 12 years old. The first thing he did was hand me a broom and dustpan. Then he taught me how to use the cash register and make change. When I was an expert I started soaping customers' faces and putting on hot towels. A shave was 200. That was that would buy two hamburgers big ones, quarter-pounders. That's what we're talking about when we say the good old days. The good old days. That's what that means.

There are no shaves here any more. Don't want to do them. Don't have my razors in shape. I stopped shaving in 1937. But I've given haircuts to Sherman Adams and Meldrim Thomson, the New Hampshire governors before Gallen. Thomson sometimes came in with a body guard.

You've got to be a pretty good barber to keep customers coming to you for 54 years, and I've got one whose been with me that long, starting in shops before this one. Men are more vain about their appearance than women. Women are the heaviest tippers and the least complainers. Men don't tip, they complain. They want to check this, check that, a mirror here, a mirror there. The freshmen at Dartmouth tip, but after that they don't. You won't get any tips out of the upperclassmen.