Old-time barber cuts a niche in Artesia history, imparting baseball and political wisdom to customers spanning three generations.

Peering in from the bright sidewalk at 11 in the morning, a man presses his forehead to the screen door of Joe’s Barber Shop in Artesia.

“How many?” he asks, scanning the little square room that looks out of another era on 187th Street. “How much longer?”

Inside, Joe Nieto, a relic himself, stands where he has for 41 years--between the barber’s chair and the mirror. He counts six customers, about all the shop will hold, and answers, “Half hour.”

The man enters and takes the last seat, joining the other men who come in every two weeks to shoot the bull and get away from their troubles, or at least unload them on Nieto, who is as quick with a joke or an opinion as he is with his scissors.

“Busy, busy all the time, gettin’ too old for this,” says the short, stout barber, wearing his customary short-sleeved blue shirt and gray pants. “I’m the only one-chair shop I know of that’s left.”

On a shelf beside the chair is a container of instant lather, a whisk broom full of talcum powder and a bottle of Osage Rub, green liquid that the label says is cooling for hands and face.

Nieto tips his round face back and looks down through his glasses as he applies electric clippers to the back of another head. Hair falls to the patch of bare floor beneath Nieto’s feet; the linoleum wore through long ago.

Nieto has little hair himself, although enough to require occasional trimming by a customer he calls “Old Portuguese Tony,” who used to be a barber in Canada.

Waiting for a $5 haircut, the customers sit on orange upholstered chairs that have seen better days. In a corner, near a fan that is doing its best to cool the room, an American flag sits on a TV set. In another, a radio plays country music and competes with sports trophies for space on a table.

In addition to a railroad calendar, the paneled walls hold photos of Little League teams that Nieto has coached, and color snapshots of his 16 baseball-playing grandchildren, most of the boys wearing the flattop grandpa gave them.

One of them, Tom Nieto, is a catcher with the Minnesota Twins. “I check the newspaper every morning to see what he’s doing,” Joe says. “Ruins my day. He’s in a hell of a slump.”

Baseball is a hot topic here, along with politics. “Those are the only two subjects,” Nieto says. “We’re too old to talk about women.” He keeps a supply of girlie magazines nonetheless.

Outside, a familiar horn honks. “We call him ‘The Mortician,’ ” Nieto says, looking out the window at the passing car driven by an old friend. “He picks up dead horses and cows (from race tracks, stables and farms). He’s been passing here five or six times a day for 38 years.”

Nieto is well-known in Artesia. He twice ran unsuccessfully for City Council and is a former grand marshal of the annual city parade.

“If you don’t know Joe Nieto, you don’t know anybody,” says John Jordan, a Camel-smoking man of 54 who has known the barber since they were kids.

Jordan had come just to visit, to laugh with Nieto and the others. Although tufts of hair spring from beneath his cap, Jordan says it isn’t time for a trim. “He goes to Super Cuts,” Nieto joked.

They talk of baseball and politics, but also of guns, fishing trips, military experiences and, in quieter tones, a fellow regular who might not make it in until later because he has gone to the hospital for chemotherapy.

A man whose turn it is sits draped in a sheet, the eyes of the others upon him. He feels the clippers on his neck, watches his hair’s descent and hears, above the buzzing and the conversation, a voice from the radio sing “If the whiskey doesn’t get me, the memories will.”

An old-timer comes into the shop. He gets a broom and sweeps away the hair, then sits down and blends in with the others. He is Joe Lopes. Because Nieto admires the way he helps other senior citizens, fixing their toasters and coffee pots, he will get his haircut free.

By early afternoon the men have gone, replaced by women and their sons.

One boy, to appease his mother, sits still and obeys Nieto, who tells him, “Look down one second, Nathan; a little more tickle on the neck.” He puts what he calls “goop” on Nathan’s hair before combing.

“You look like little Ricky Ricardo,” Nathan’s mother says as he happily climbs down from the clouds of powder and receives a sucker from Nieto.

At 4 o’clock, with all the customers gone, Nieto rests on one of the orange chairs. “If I’m unlucky, I’ll get eight or nine construction workers at the end and be here until 8,” he says.

It was 1947 when he started here, shaving dairy farmers on Saturday nights. But years have passed and the little boys to whom he gave first haircuts have grown into men.

“Now I cut their kids’ hair,” says Nieto, who, now that it is stretching into third generations realizes that he too, at 62, has become an old-timer. “I don’t feel like one, but it’s there, you know.”

He has gained and imparted wisdom in here: “I’ve got doctors, lawyers and teachers, so you learn a little bit about everything. They even ask me questions.”

On the radio, the Gatlin Brothers sing about the love of a lifetime. Nieto’s love is here in this old-town atmosphere.

“It’s like family with some people; you get kind of close,” he says. “It’s hard when somebody dies, it kind of hurts.”

Nieto lives a block from the shop with Jessie, his wife of 39 years. They have raised six children. “She wants me to retire,” Nieto says, thinking about all those nights she’s had to hold dinner until he finished the last customer.

“But I’ve had too much fun here. You hear a lot of sad stories, but the majority make you feel good and want to live forever.”