Barber Chair – Larry Johnston, Nostalgic Artist

The Barber Chair

Cave Springs, Georgia

I was due to exhibit in an Art Show in Rome, Georgia and then in Cave Springs, so I visited the area to see what I could find in the way of Nostalgia. Cave Springs was a quaint little town in which I noticed a barber shop, just off the square. It had the letters painted on the windows, which you could see through to the inside.

We went inside the shop and I immediately noticed several porcelain barber chairs, in which one was filled with a young man, who was being given a haircut by the only barber in the shop. Just as he finished and the gentleman left the shop, we asked the barber if we could ask him some questions and told him what my intentions were. His reply was, “You can ask me anything but my age.”

It was the mid to late 1980’s and I had noticed a sign he had posted that said, “$1.00 Haircuts”. He said he had always given haircuts for a dollar and didn’t see any reason to change. The sign on the door was Hot Showers and Air Conditioning. When he started cutting hair in that shop decades previously, Cave Springs was just off the main truck route, so many truckers would stop after a long trip, take a shower and get a haircut.