Stories Come Free With $5 Haircuts
People travel a long way for a haircut from Warren Hill.
They come from Fairchild Air Force Base. They come from Bonners Ferry, Idaho.
“I don’t know why,” Hill, 66, says with a shrug.
Go in, and you get the idea it’s not so much the haircuts he gives. It’s the stories he tells.
The owner of the Big Horn Barber Shop and Western Art Gallery loves a good yarn.
Hill has been a barber all his adult life and has cut hair in Browne’s Addition for 28 years.
“You meet everybody from convicts to preachers,” says Hill. “I’ve met senators. I’ve met no-good, downright drunk bums.”
And they all pay $5.
Hill has seen more than customers come and go from the window of his shop on Cannon Street. He’s seen a beautiful area begin to decline, then come back again.
He’s seen haircuts go from Woodstock-long to boot-camp short.
“I’m glad that (former Seahawk Brian) Bosworth is out of football,” Hill says. “I was having to cut lightning bolts in hair there for a while.”
These days, kids walk by the shop with orange hair and dog collars around their necks without much notice.
But ask Hill about 1974, Spokane’s World’s Fair year.
“That was the craziest year I’ve seen,” Hill said.
A neighborhood grocer retired on money he made making runs down to the river to sell beer to crowds of camping hippies, here for Expo ‘74. A guy kept driving around in a ‘39 Chevy with no windows, his car packed full of marijuana plants.
And then there was the skinnydipping.
“One old man said, ‘It’s disgraceful what I’ve seen with my binoculars,”’ Hill remembers, then lets out a laugh that starts like an idling V-8 and ends like an engine that won’t turn over. “That was the kind of year it was.”
The Big Horn seems like a place you’d expect a good story. Two vinyl waiting benches look too big for the tiny shop, suggesting some folks drop by just to talk.
“He knows a lot of people,” says longtime customer Walter Carmack. Carmack and Hill meet once a week to play pinochle.
The shop is homey. An antelope head and ram’s horns are mounted to the wall.
Hill has a “jackalope,” too - a rabbit with antlers fastened to it.
But Hill doesn’t hunt anymore. “I’m an expert shot, and it’s really not a sport,” he says, dressed in a cowboy shirt and a bolo tie. “It’d be a sport if they’d let those deer shoot back.”
Prints of oil paintings and some jewelry comprise the “gallery.” Those are the work of Hill’s wife, Lucille. She doesn’t paint anymore; it’s tough for her to bend over the canvas, he said.
Her painted animals look alive and fluid, from the texture of their fur to the ripples of their cocked muscles beneath. A man who bought a painting of a buffalo told the Hills he had to take it out of his bedroom.
“It stared at me all night long,” the man had said.
One of the Hills’ favorites is a painting of Icicle Falls near Leavenworth, Wash.. The sky is half cheery blue; but gray rage is rolling in with the wind. The rocks are jagged-sharp, dark and hard. The trees descending toward the creek are tall and green and shrouded. The water could freeze you to death.
A yellowing photo of an antique barber chair also hangs on the wall. Hill sold that chair a few years ago; it had been around for 52 years.
It was in use back when he was still in barber college downtown, where he met Lucille.
Most barbers gave shaves back then.
“The instructor took us back through swinging doors into the cheap tavern. … It was Skid Row,” Hill starts. “The winos would sit there - drunked up beyond heaven - they’d grab one, take ‘im in, and if you cut ‘im, it didn’t matter. All you got was wine.
“And that’s how you learned to shave.”
Then comes the familiar laugh. The stories and laughs will remain for a while, Hill says.
“I’m not the retiring type.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo
MEMO: Neighbors is a regular feature of the South Side Voice that profiles interesting people in our community. If you know someone who would make a good profile subject, please let us know. Write to Neighbors, South Side Voice, P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210. Call 459-5489. Fax 459-5475.