EPILOGUE

It was in special places such as the school room, the factory floor, the front porch, the backyard—and the barber (and beauty shop)—that cultural practices and values were transferred, and transformed, across generations.

—Norm Rosenberg, history professor, Macalester College, from the foreword of Mic Hunter’s The American Barbershop

One day at the Marvy factory, Scott Gohr leaned over a workbench holding the company’s smallest model, the eighteen-inch 410 wall mount. It includes ten inches of glass and sticks out eight inches from the wall.

“This one here is unique,” Scott said, his cloud-gray ponytail dangling down his back.

Unique? That means one-of-a-kind. What can be unique for a company that has cranked out eighty-five thousand barber poles by hand the last sixty-four years?

“Usually we keep a hole in the bottom in case moisture gets inside, we leave a way for it to get out,” he said. “And usually we put a little motor inside to make it spin.”

Not this Model 410. The reason was as a sweet as it was slightly morbid.

Down near Tampa, Florida, in a town called Valrico, fifty-eight-year-old Michael Taylor sells wholesale fuel at a maintenance facility and truck stop. His wife, Michelle, owned the popular Hair We Go salon for twenty years.

“Her whole life story was working with hair,” Michael said. “That was her passion.”

Michelle died as a result of Huntington’s disease, which robbed her of her muscle coordination, in August 2013. She was only fifty-six.

“I had to get my composure, but I wanted to do something special as a tribute and honor to her life,” he said. They’d been married twenty-eight years.

Then he got an idea.

“I was thinking of a unique urn to make for her ashes after she was cremated. It took a while, but the only thing I could come up with was a barber pole. That was her life.”

He asked his funeral director, who shook his head and said there was no such thing on the market. He talked to some people he found online, but they said “not many barber poles are made any more because people steal them for fraternity party clubhouses.”

Then Michael Taylor heard about the William Marvy Company some 1,500 miles north in Minnesota.

“I researched them online and learned that they were one of the oldest companies, and I talked to a few people who said the quality of their poles was like no other.”

For $450, he ordered the pole to which Scott Gohr was gently applying glue from his tiny paintbrush.

A few weeks later, Michael was showing the custom-made Marvy 410 to his sisters-in-law and co-workers from his late wife’s salon.

“They were all tickled to death and impressed, and it’s actually just about the perfect tribute.”

He put some mementos and photos in the cylinder along with his wife’s ashes and mounted the makeshift urn in her bedroom upstairs.

“I thought about the living room or the mantel, but her dressing room was where she styled her hair. She would just absolutely love it. I took my time, and it was well thought out. And I couldn’t think of a better way to honor her.”

So Scott Gohr, the ponytailed barber pole technician on the Marvy factory floor, was right. Marvy Model 410, No. 84,942, is unique all right.

WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID ABOUT MARVY

Never one to shy away from free publicity, William Marvy sat for countless interviews after emerging from this basement shop with the first Marvy 55.

Here are some excerpts from stories that sprang from those interviews he granted over the years:

“In a room behind the ancient cash register, seated at his ancient rolltop desk, advised by his son Bob—who will inherit the business if there is anything left to inherit—William Marvy ponders the future of barber poles.”

—Charles Kuralt, CBS, On the Road

“Garrulous and substantial, Marvy delivers the bluster of P.T. Barnum and the malarkey of the traveling salesman he once was.”

—John Margolies, Gentleman’s Quarterly, December 1984

“Marvy is a substantial, pink-faced man with a sandy mustache and a booming voice…Before meeting Marvy, a visitor imagines someone like the last buffalo hunter, a badlands bad man left over from the century before, gloomily waiting for the great herds to come again. But Marvy sees himself as a man of modern commerce…a kind of spring-wound relic: the breezy, bet-on-the-future confidence of a Midwestern traveling salesman from a half-century ago.”

—John Skow, Time (magazine), April 21, 1980

“William Marvy looks exactly like the nation’s last barber pole manufacturer should look—balding, clipped mustache, half-moon glasses perched halfway down his nose, a cigar clamped in the right corner of his mouth.”

—John Camp (who went on to write popular mysteries as John Sanford),

—St. Paul Pioneer Press, May 12, 1980

“He sees himself as a man doing his part to keep the barber symbol alive now that other trade symbols—the mortar and pestle for the pharmacist, the three gold balls of the pawn broker, the wooden Indian of the tobacco store—are vanishing.”

—Steve Berg, Minneapolis Tribune, 1977.

“In the coffee room, where an occasional game of nickel-ante poker is played at lunchtime, Marvy packs his pipe, settles his substantial self into a chair, sets aside his half-moon spectacles, props his wingtips up on a chair. He’s ready to talk about the good old days—the days before the Beatles made ‘crewcut’ a nasty word, when a haircut was a haircut and a shave was a shave.”

—Gretchen Legler, Twin Cities (magazine), 1985

“He got up from his desk and went into the showroom of the converted car repair shop that has been home to his company…There, high on the wall, resplendent with gold plated castings, was number 50,000.

“‘Think of any number between 1 and 68,000,’ he said, ‘and I’ll tell you where those two poles went.’

“‘Really?’

“‘Do it.’

“OK; 125 and 62,069.’

“‘Come on back to the office.’

“He pulled out two ledger books, one yellowed with age, the other fairly new.

“‘No. 125 went to Shakopee, Minnesota, in March 1950 and No. 62,069 went to Burnsby, British Columbia, December 16, 1976.’

“Marvy pointed with his cigar for emphasis.

“‘See,’ he said.”

—Charles Leroux, Chicago Tribune, June 25, 1981