Cut and Dried : The Traditional Look Is the Wave at Plaza Barbers

With his clippers and tonics, the barbershop owner is from the old school. So are many of his customers, who come in for small talk and to get their hair cut high on the sides and tight against the scalp.

“We don’t do that styling and blow drying,” said Dick McClenahan, who for 30 years has held forth at Plaza Barbers, an old-time shop on Woodruff Avenue, where the short haircuts of yesterday live on. “I still have the butch wax and some of the creams. We do an awful lot of flattops.”

The bottles, the aromas of their contents nostalgically familiar, are lined up under the fluorescent lights--Vitalis, Wildroot Cream Oil, Brylcreem, Aqua Velva Hair Tonic, Lucky Tiger After Shave.

The experience in McClenahan’s chair is reminiscent of the haircut ritual in the neighborhood barbershops of the 1950s and ‘60s:

The sense of confinement when the sheet is draped on, the tightness of the paper collar, the snip-snip of the scissors and buzz of the clippers, the eyes shut against the falling hair, the itching behind the neck, the barber’s breath as he shoots the breeze.

Then the combing, the lather applied behind the ears, the scrape of the frighteningly sharp razor, the vacuuming of loose hair, the dusting with talcum powder, the inspection of the back through the hand mirror.

Then the undraping, accompanied by the barber’s “Yes, sir.” And, finally, the reaching for the wallet to fish out the money--$7 now, whereas it used to be a dollar. Maybe a buck tip.

Then out the door. See you in three weeks.

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McClenahan, 56, first cut hair in the Navy. He came to Plaza Barbers in 1962 after completing barber school, and a year later became co-owner. The shop has been in a small mall near Los Coyotes Diagonal since 1970. The 17 previous years, it was at Spring Street and Palo Verde Avenue.

“There’s not many regular barbershops around anymore,” McClenahan said. He wore a white smock over blue-gray pants. Hair stuck to his shoes. His own hair has gradually disappeared to where there is little for Phil Owens, the full-time barber one chair over, or part-timer Tommy Waggoner, 89, to cut.

“So many shops closed up in the ‘70s,” McClenahan went on, “because they wouldn’t do what the customers wanted. The old-timers just weren’t used to seeing men with long hair. It really disgusted some of them. I guess I felt the same way, but I gritted my teeth and tried to do a good job. And I didn’t have much of a problem because I had cut women’s hair in barber school.”

Many of McClenahan’s customers--who first came to him as youngsters, then as fathers and, now, as grandfathers--have always come in for a short, regular haircut. They would never be caught at Shear Pleasure or Super Cuts or Hair Fantasy or Hair It Is.

Yet some of the patrons, who prefer their hair fuller, have from time to time sneaked off to styling salons. “Their wives or girlfriends talk them into it,” McClenahan said, “but they always come back.

Al Kersch, 62, of Cypress, came in on a recent weekday and sat in McClenahan’s chair, next to a storefront window that looks out on the mall’s parking lot.

“Most of the places now are beauty shops. I don’t come in to be beautiful,” Kersch said. He laughed and added: “When I say I know this man, I know this man. He’s a typical old-time barber. He has an opinion on everything. He’s accommodating and makes you feel comfortable. He doesn’t have a mean bone in his body.”

Kersch recalled when McClenahan had a handlebar mustache. “One time he had it a foot long, and it was red,” Kersch said. “Believe me, he cried when his wife made him take it off.”

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McClenahan, who lives in Long Beach, arrives at work at 7:30 a.m. and leaves around 6 p.m. every day except Sunday and Monday, when the shop is closed. He said he never gets bored. “Oh, like everybody else I’ll get up sometimes in the morning and say, ‘Oh, gosh, do I have to go back to that place,’ but when I get here I hardly ever leave. I enjoy my job.”

The white-walled barbershop reflects the owner’s life. There are bowling trophies he has won. There is a set of elk horns--a memento of a hunting trip--that serves as a coatrack. There are framed pictures of his grandchildren, of an admiral whose hair he cut and of Frank Mollica, his former partner, who died 16 years ago.

“He was like a second father to me,” McClenahan said. “We used to do a little fishing together.”

The shop’s radio was tuned to an oldies station. The TV was off, used only on Saturdays when bowling is on.

“Yes, sir,” McClenahan said, as another customer--there had been a steady stream since Kersch--stepped down from the chair.

The barber took a smoke break, swept up the hair and reflected on his profession.

“I picked it up easy,” he said. “I was fortunate to have a steady hand.”

And a receptive ear.

“I don’t know if they think you’re a shrink or something,” he said, referring to his customers, “but they open up in a barber chair. And you learn in this business to agree with their opinions whether you have one of your own or not.”

The most haircuts McClenahan ever did in a day was 65. On a good day he will do about 40. “One day is real busy, and the next we’re sitting on our backsides,” he said.

When it’s busy, on Tuesdays and Saturdays, there is an endless procession of heads, and McClenahan seems to know what each requires. “You’ve just got to know your customer,” he said. “It’s like a little bell rings and I’ll remember that he wanted it a little shorter last time.”

Or she. In a departure from barbershop tradition, Plaza Barbers welcomes women customers.

“He does it the way I want it,” said Frannie Claffey, as McClenahan snipped at her red hair. “At a salon they do it the way they want it.”

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There is a longing for yesterday in the barbershop. The world was better, McClenahan said, when he was young. “Now it’s kids with their dope, and gangs and shooting. Families were closer in those years.”

But inside his shop, with its sounds and scents, it seems those years never ended, and McClenahan is reminded of when he was a boy at Red Fetterolf’s barbershop in Centre Hall, Pa. “It was a local hangout,” he said. “Red was a jolly fellow, and he treated everybody nice. It was always comfortable going into his place.”

It was a Saturday afternoon now at Plaza Barbers, and the bench along the wall was crowded. Young boys looked forward to the bubble gum in a drawer beneath the cash register. Old-timers thumbed through Field & Stream, though not the Saturday Evening Post anymore. Chris Schenkel’s voice and the clatter of bowling pins mixed with the shop banter.

A red, white and blue barber pole would have completed this picture of the past, but one did not adorn the outside of the shop.

“I’ve had three, but they all got stolen,” McClenahan said. “People like them for their dens.”