Sampling A Slice Of Bygone Era
Just moments after Ernest Dascola described how he once nearly sliced off the end of a customer’s nose, I leaned back in his baby-blue barber chair, lifted my chin, and allowed him to press a gleaming, just-stropped straight razor against that most precious vein in my neck.
This didn’t take as much courage as it might seem. Dascola, 77, the son, brother and uncle of barbers, has been scraping the fuzz off men’s faces since before he had whiskers himself.
Long before double-edged blades and twin-blade cartridges, before Bic and Schick came in disposables, before that sorry Santa rode his electric shaver across our TV screens, Dascola’s father placed a blade and a belt into the hands of his 10-year-old son and taught him the art of the straight-razor shave.
Today it’s a vanishing art. New razor technology, mass-marketing and the quickening pace of life all have contributed to its virtual extinction. Most barber schools don’t teach straight-razor shaving anymore. Few barbers will do it. And most men, apparently, don’t want it.
But I couldn’t resist. I’m that lazy.
I also believed I was in good hands. Dascola’s first solo shave came in 1928 in the barbershop-poolroom his Italian-born father had opened in Michigan’s upper peninsula. A decade later, young Dascola was offering 35-cent shaves at the Ann Arbor, Mich., barbershop he opened with one of his hair-cutting brothers.
When I met him there recently, a shave cost $11. Otherwise, the place still had the feel of the 1930s. A row of antique Koken barber chairs dominated the room, and Dascola was busy stropping the black-handled Swedish razor he would use on me. Slap, slide. Slap, slide. “If it’s not sharp,” he informed me, “it pulls awful.”
If it IS sharp, of course, it can cut awful. The clean-shaven Dascola acknowledged this up front, regaling me with the story of the Big Slip, that incident decades ago when he buried the tip of his blade into the tip of a Salvation Army officer’s nose.
After a hospital visit, three stitches and a good excuse, the officer was still a customer. “I was getting married the next day,” Dascola explains, “and I was pretty nervous about it.”
Upon hearing this, I got pretty nervous, too. But there was no turning back. Dascola smocked me, put me in a chair, and before I knew it, I was relaxing into a luxurious, soapy cheek massage. Next, a steaming-hot towel covered my face, then more soap, and more massage. Now I could get used to this!
My beard was ready, though, so Dascola whipped out his blade, and for the next 10 minutes - the razor dancing deftly between his fingertips, his free hand pulling, pushing and pinching my pug - Dascola stripped my face of its .015 inches of hair.
He might have stripped it of that much skin as well. I’m not sure. But that’s how it felt.
Frankly, I lost my enthusiasm after the first few strokes. Seven years of electric shaving, I discovered, had left my face vulnerable to the hard edge of a steel blade. Halfway through the experience, I was crying inside for my Remington Micro-Screen.
By the time Dascola snapped shut his razor, my eyes were bulging and my cheeks were smooth. But that wasn’t enough for Dascola. “The proof of a good shave,” he declared as he poured alcohol-based astringent into his palms, “is if you jump out of your chair right now.”
Then he slapped my cheeks with his wet hands. When he had to peel me off the fluorescent lights, Dascola was satisfied. “You’ve been sterilized,” he said.
I wouldn’t be surprised.
Mention: The average American spends 60 hours a year - or about four months during his lifetime - cutting the 15,000 to 30,000 hairs on his face.
American Legion Magazine, 1992
Men and women: What’s your secret to a good, comfortable shave? Send responses to VoiceMale, P.O. Box 8071, Lexington, Ky. 40533-8071, or to e-mail address nchet@aol.com.
Neil Chethik writes VoiceMale, a nationally syndicated men’s column.
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Neil Chethik Universal Press Syndicate