Haircut Sunday grooms minds as much as hair

Haircut Sunday struggled with truth in advertising last week.

Its usual meeting day — the last Sunday of the month — fell on Christmas Day.

So Haircut Sunday moved to Monday.

This group of men tromps into the basement of Tom Westbrook’s brick house on the South Hill every month to gather around a real barber chair for haircuts and to share ideas for the common good. Their hair, as it falls in downy tufts onto a blue barber’s cape, ranges mostly from salt-and-pepper to fog gray to soft white. Catholics and Jews, Protestants and secular humanists, they share common values, if not backgrounds, and largely progressive points of view.

Today, the first day of the New Year, their example provides inspiration for the rest of us.

Westbrook, a 78-year-old retired college teacher and inventor, first convened Haircut Sunday 12 years ago. It spun out of his frustration after his favorite Davenport Hotel barber, Rudy Duarte, retired. Finally, he called up Duarte with a deal — if Rudy would show up once a month in Westbrook’s basement, Tom would draft his friends for haircuts.

The friends turned out to be a group of open-minded deep thinkers, and so the conversation began.

Last week it started with a wine tasting poured by Spokane attorney and winery owner Bill Powell. He told of his daughter, Sarah, and her career as an Oregon wine maker. She died of cancer in 2004.

The men raised a glass: “To Bill’s daughter Sarah.”

“To a better world.”

Then they got right down to it — and tried to figure out how to create one.

Too many of us zip through our days, taking a few moments here and there to absorb the news, check off our to-do lists, and then re-enter the fray. We seldom take the time to share our ideas about the greater good or to be, as Westbrook says, citizens rather than simply consumers.

Haircut Sunday harkens back to the old days of men gathering around barber chairs or potbellied stoves to hash over current events. For those of us who grew up with “The Andy Griffith Show,” Haircut Sunday’s rather like Floyd’s barbershop, with a quantum leap in collective I.Q.

Members and guests have included Spokane mayors — and a former mayor’s architect husband — attorneys, engineers, journalists, clergy, social workers, scientists and non-profit agency heads. The most famous ever to show up was former Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy. He died in December.

McCarthy was Westbrook’s former professor, and Westbrook was his ardent fan and political supporter. He visited Spokane several times. Both men were Catholics. After McCarthy’s death last month, Westbrook’s daughter quipped, “I think there were more pictures of Eugene McCarthy in our house than of Jesus.”

Last week Westbrook led the conversation with the deftness of a television host. At turns, he sounded rather like John McLaughlin, quickly steering the conversation to new topics before it could even think to lag.

The conversation centered around two main topics on this afternoon — how Americans might respond to the Bush administration’s secret wiretapping, and how solar energy holds the potential to solve the world’s oil crisis.

The words that most enthralled the group were spoken by scientist Shibli Bayyuk. On harnessing the energy of the sun, he predicted: “Light is going to be the ultimate source of the future.”

There also were moments of other kinds of grace. In one of them, a retired Episcopal priest leaned back in the barber chair, his eyes closed beatifically, as Duarte trimmed his beard. In others, men shared their fears — and discovered it’s the illness of a child that chills them most.

On any given Sunday, about 20 guys show up in Westbrook’s basement, and that’s about all the green plastic chairs the room can hold. This barbershop’s full. But Westbrook believes other groups can do the same thing. All you need is a place to meet — with or without a barber chair — a batch of friends to call, and the willingness to help the conversation begin.

We’re all yearning for intimacy, for a place in our lives where we can share who we are and what we think and feel. For this group of wise men, Haircut Sunday’s that place.

Where will you find such a space in your life?

Ponder your answer. There you’ll find a fine resolution. It should top your list for 2006.