83-Year-Old Barber Won’t Split Hairs: He’s Still Cut Out for Job After 70 Years

Old-time barber Carney Phillips, 83, can tell you stories reaching back to World War I, and you get it with a Tennessee drawl.

“You can take a Southerner out of the state, but you can’t take the state out of a Southerner,” he likes to say.

These days, Phillips’ one-chair shop in Santa Ana isn’t filled much, except with rock ‘n’ roll music from his stereo radio, which blares all day.

He still works 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. six days a week.

Looking through the shop’s big sliding glass door, he mused, “Half the cemetery near here is filled with people who were my customers, and I just lost another good friend yesterday.”

His voice dropped and he started to weep. “He was a good ol’ boy,” Phillips murmured.

All customers are regulars in his hard-to-find shop behind a shopping district. He sometimes naps in an adjacent room and says it’s too bad if someone just pops in for a haircut. “They should have made an appointment.”

In fact, all hair cuts, which cost $6, are by appointment and there are few of those: sometimes three a day, sometimes one.

Phillips, who started cutting hair at 13 when barbers didn’t need a license, says he has enough money to retire.

“You’d think after cutting hair for 70 years a man would want to set out on the back porch,” he said. “But that’s not for me.”

Back in the 1970s, he almost faced a forced retirement from cancer, but he recovered after major surgery.

“The good ol’ boy saved me,” he said, pointing upward. “Maybe it’s because I’ve been a good ol’ boy all my life.”

Phillips is prone to reminiscing. “I wanted to be in the military and fight for the country, but I was too young for World War I and too old for World War II,” he said.

He remembers the time he worked in a shop with women, “but I wasn’t happy about that. They clattered a lot.” Unafraid of feminists, he says women “should stay on their side of the fence.”

His wife, Mary, 73, tolerates those notions.

They’ve been married 59 years and have two children and a bunch of grandchildren.

“When you’re happy, time goes by faster than you want it to,” he said.

During the last year, Marc Lemieux, 30, has been keenly aware of hundreds of dog bite incidents in San Clemente, where he works as the animal services officer.

And many of the victims were mail carriers.

So with his new dog B.D. (Bad Dog), Lemieux held a seminar for 30 mail carriers to demonstrate the most effective way for them to deal with an aggressive canine.

Actually, B.D. is a wooden replica of a dog. He built it from wood, installed a broom handle for a tail and put in ball-bearing eyes.

Despite its funny look, it can duplicate the feeling of a charging dog (except for the bite) when Lemieux thrusts it at a person.

“That let them feel what a vicious dog can do without using a live dog,” he said. “It heightened their awareness.”

In addition, Lemieux taught carriers the basic principles of self-defense against dogs and explained that dogs act the way they do because they feel mail carriers are invading their territory.

“This is the first time I’ve done the program,” he said. “It might even be good for meter readers and telephone men too.”

John Poynter, 60, is a tattooed ex-Navy cook and hardly looks like a softy, but he is. “He’s all heart,” said Robert Theemling, director of the Orangewood Children’s Home in Orange, where Poynter runs the kitchen.

Poynter, of Cypress, bakes and decorates birthday cakes when an abused, neglected or abandoned temporary resident there has a birthday. There are up to 10 birthdays a week, not too many considering the home hosts 2,600 children a year.

Poynter knows all too well what a birthday cake means. He grew up without parents and said of his own early life: “No parties, no cakes, no cards, no nothing.”

He said baking a birthday cake is the least he can do to make something matter in their lives.

Poynter also pays for most of the birthday cake supplies himself.

Acknowledgments--Howard Hitchcok, 60, a sculptor for 30 years and author of “Out of the Fiery Furnace,” which describes casting sculpture from ceramic shell molds, was named outstanding artist for 1987 by the Huntington Beach Allied Arts Board.