The Slice: When haircuts were built to last

Once upon a time in America, there was a sheep shearing operation carried out on a massive scale at the start of every summer.

Only it wasn’t sheep being clipped. It was boys – U.S. Grade A boys, on the hoof.

It was the era of the “summer haircut.”

Parents would haul their sons into barber shops and say, “Give him the economy cut.”

This was universally understood by barbers to be a haircut so close to the scalp that draftees recently sheared for basic training looked like hippies by comparison. These were haircuts so close to the scalp that they made Marines look like beatnik poets.

And the thing is, almost all American boys of the era did not start out with anything remotely like long hair. Even after the Beatles, it took a few years for mainstream hairstyles to loosen up. So those barber shears were not exactly hacking away at long, flowing tresses.

Parents wanted their boys to have haircuts that would last all summer. The kids could get another one just before school was about to start in the fall, according to the reasoning of the time.

Freshly shorn youths would slowly emerge from barbershops looking slightly dazed. They would blink as if unaccustomed to being in the light and run a tentative hand over their head, noticing each freshly exposed contour.

Parents would pronounce themselves well pleased.

“Now you look like somebody!”

If the newly streamlined lad’s inclination was to say “Yeah, somebody doing a life sentence,” he usually kept it to himself.

Oh, sure. Some kids still get summer haircuts. But they usually don’t wind up looking as if they had just undergone radical lice control measures or been the victim of a lab experiment gone horribly wrong.

It’s a different time. But you probably don’t need me to tell you that.

Warm-up questions: What’s the prevailing attitude about wearing shorts to work at your place of business? Do you want your sunglasses to make a statement? When is an incoming text more important than whatever the person you are with is saying (or, in 2017, is this question really a failure to recognize the unjudged ubiquity of multitasking)?

Today’s Slice question: In recognition of the Stanley Cup Finals being underway and as an acknowledgment of our proximity to the True North, Strong and Free … Where can you be served poutine around here (and by that, I mean without having to go to Canada)?

Write The Slice at P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; email pault@spokesman.com. It’s not really a bold, brave gesture if you unfollow someone on Twitter and that person fails to notice.