Still Fast after 50 years: Barber is a Newport institution

Newport Beach was a different place in 1967, but then, as it does now, it had Coast Barbers and “Fast Eddie” Bañuelos.

Bañuelos moved into an unassuming Corona del Mar storefront at 333 Marigold Ave. in July 1967 and hasn’t left — and doesn’t seem likely to. At 79 years old, he cuts hair all day, five days a week.

“This beats working,” he said with a grin.

His shop, behind a mattress store a few paces off East Coast Highway, isn’t fussy. It started with a single chair and sink. Now it has two sinks and three chairs and couldn’t reasonably fit more. It doesn’t need them. He and his employees — a nephew and grandson — are pretty efficient.

Fast, even.

Grandson Daniel Bañuelos is stationed by the window. Nephew Angel Garcia is by the magazine stand. Fast Eddie is the center chair. He’s always been set up right in the middle of the room.

In these chairs, the barbers and their patrons talk about grandkids, insurance premiums and the aches and pains of age, as customers get the clippers to look neat for work, weddings or just for the sake of looking sharp.

Everyone has preferences, and Bañuelos commits them to memory. He’ll give advice — don’t cut a cowlick too short, lest you want an Alfalfa-esque antenna — but what his clients want, they get.

“People say, ‘Hey, you’re your own boss,’ ” he said. “I say every customer that sits in my chair is my boss.”

His customers are loyal. Thursdays are his appointment-only days. When regulars aren’t well enough to leave their homes, or they’re in a hospital or another care facility, he packs up his tools in a briefcase and goes to them.

Balboa Island resident Bob Teller, 78, has been a fan for about 40 years. He comes in every six weeks or so to maintain his flattop.

“You go where you’re comfortable,” he said.

If a building could be a dad, it would be Coast Barbers. This is an unabashedly but genially manly space. Boxing gloves dangle off the magazine stand corners and Road & Track, Rolling Stone and a couple of buried Playboys sit on its racks. The air is thick and warm with the woody-spicy-menthol cologne of Gabels Bay Rum aftershave, Osage Rub tonic and Pinauld Clubman talcum.

Clippings of Bañuelos’s professional adventures hang from the wall, around black-and-white photos of him as a young soldier with red paper American Legion poppies tucked into the frames. A celebratory gold pennant banner cheering the shop’s 50th anniversary hangs from the mirror.

Bañuelos is a traditionalist. All haircuts come with a complimentary cleanup around the ears and back of the neck with a straight razor. It’s a finishing touch that young barbers must learn to get their state licenses, but that many abandon for electric razors, ostensibly in the name of even lines.

Or, most likely, he said, “a lot of them don’t know how to shave.”

He and his guys do basic cuts, beard trims, mustache shaping, and, for $25, a hot-towel shave.

Bañuelos doesn’t take credit or debit cards, and he keeps receipts on a spike by the cash register. Have we mentioned that he’s old-school?

His dad and younger brother were barbers; his dad ran a combination pool hall-barber shop, separated by a swinging door, in Garden Grove.

His brothers worked in the pool hall, but Bañuelos preferred the barber shop. It was cleaner. It smelled nicer.

After his Army service in the 1950s, he went to the then-American Barber College in downtown Long Beach. Before long, he was the in-house barber for the Philco-Ford aerospace plant that once occupied a spot near what is now the Bonita Canyon Sports Park.

Layoffs started hitting Philco-Ford after he’d been there for about six years. He took the opportunity to hang out his own shingle on Marigold, about three miles away, to keep his customers. Some of his originals still come in.

He earned his snappy sobriquet from a Corona del Mar High School basketball coach, who sent his young athletes to Eddie.

He still cuts high school boys’ hair. He also has cut the hair of former U.S. Rep. Christopher Cox, countless Newport mayors, three of the six current councilmen and untold numbers of babies getting their first trims.

He gave Angel his first haircut 52 years ago. Now Angel cuts Eddie’s hair. His uncle, he agreed, taught him everything he knows.

Angel doesn’t call him Uncle Eddie. He calls him Fast.

As snips of hair slid down his shoulders, one of Angel’s customers leaned over to the elder statesman and said, “So, you opened this shop when you were in high school?” Bañuelos chuckled and shook the man’s hand.

“People say, ‘When are you gonna hang it up?’” Bañuelos said. “I say, ‘Give me 20 more years.’”

hillary.davis@latimes.com

Twitter: @Daily_PilotHD