A hair-raising elegy: Growing up in Georgetown at Wright Smith’s Barbershop, 1960-1964, and beyond
I don’t remember my first haircuts as a child growing up in small town Ontario. My memories of hair- raising adventures date back to about 1960, when I was around eight years old. A new barber arrived in town, Mr. Wright Smith, who set up shop on Main Street.
I always went to Wright’s in the company of my motor-mouthed dad.
My father thought the world of Mr. Wright Smith. The name Wright Smith was bandied about at our dinner table and became forever etched in my psyche like the handprint of a dream.
My dad was a garrulous veteran who was obsessed by warfare, and Mr. Wright Smith had served in the British army, so the conversations were animated and vivid while Dad was getting clipped.
When it was my turn to accede to the throne, the usual shearing was what we called a brush cut, a rapid procedure that quickly liberated me to head off to play.
However, there were times when my father and I would arrive at Wright’s, usually on a Saturday morning, and a crowd of hirsute townsmen would already be crowding and milling around the shop.
Even though Mr. Wright Smith had an apprentice in tow to take up the hairy slack, the wait seemed interminable. Why? Because I always had a hockey or a baseball match in the offing and anxiety, not Brittania, would rule my psychic waves.
I was simply terrified that I would miss my game.
During the seemingly protracted wait, I would fidget and huff and puff, shaken by paroxysms of agitation. Inevitably, the anguish of the wait would attack my bladder like a heat-seeking guided missile and I would need to pee with an urgency that generated hopping and writhing, a wretched Saint Vitus’ dance.
My father hated sports and had no patience with such quavering and distress, but Mr. Wright Smith took pity upon his pint-sized, suffering, shaggy client, and in gentle tones, tinged with a mellifluous British accent, would soothe and reassure me, promising that he would never let me miss my game.
P.S.
I have recently been in touch with one of Wright Smith’s sons, David Wright Smith, who by his own ironic account remains a long-haired hippie to this day.
David tells me that in 1964, his dad expressed a certain amount of concern that the Beatles, with their unshorn locks, would ruin his business!
David has gone on to perform Beatles songs in Ecuador:
I too adopted the hippie route for a number of years… a hirsute product of the Age of Aquarius!
Wright Smith was a person of great dignity, who passed away, far too soon, in 1992 at the age of 64, of ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
He is remembered and revered by this long-in-the-tooth former client whose hair is now much more sparse but whose gratitude remains full grown.
Your friend,
Robert
Robert McBryde – robertmcbrydeauthor.com
