He Remembers Heads, Faces and East L.A.

There are a lot of people like Leo Escarcega all over town, contributing in the little ways to make their corner of L.A. a better place. They volunteer to help the Boy Scouts. They sign petitions to right a wrong. They encourage a friend to seek elective office because it’s the right thing to do. They do it happily and quietly, never attracting much attention.

But the folks in the neighborhood always know good work when they see it and show their appreciation in their own way.

In Leo Escarcega’s case, he has done all of those things. But his biggest contribution is his best. He cuts hair.

He isn’t a Supercuts kind of guy. He doesn’t do quick 10-minute shearings. He is a neighborhood barber, a familiar fixture from the old school who never forgets a head, or a face, even if that customer hasn’t come around for years. He studies the head carefully, before and after, and afterward always asks the customer (male or female) if the $8 cut is right. Even for a longtime customer, the questions are the same. “Tell me if this looks right,” he asked one customer the other day after a 30-minute session.

“Perfect,” Richard says.

It’s been that way for the 75-year-old barber since he started cutting hair in East L.A. in 1949.

Several of my childhood friends in the 1950s went to his shop. They always came back with the style of the day, the pelon look--bald. “Hey Baldy,” I’d call out to a friend after his visit to Escarcega’s chair.

“You’re a pelon too,” Baldy would call back. He was right; I always got the pelon treatment from a colleague of Escarcega’s on Whittier Boulevard.

*

Although originally from El Paso, Tex., Escarcega considers East L.A. his only home. He feels an inseparable attraction to the community of small, modest homes and its residents east of the L.A. River. After seeing combat duty in the Pacific during World War II, and getting wounded in the battle for Okinawa, he settled into a shop on L.A.’s Westside.

Well, it really wasn’t the Westside. The shop was on Vermont Avenue near Los Angeles City College but to Escarcega, it was west--too far west. Despite a growing list of customers, Escarcega wanted his own place in East L.A.

“People always need good barbers,” he told his boss. “East L.A. is no different.”

“But why East L.A.?” his boss wondered.

“Because it is East L.A.,” he replied.

He settled into a small shop on Brooklyn Avenue and Alma Street and worked there for the next 37 years.

He worked five days a week, charging about half of the $8 he gets today. He became known for his good cuts, for the quiet way he went about his work and the encouraging words he offered to anyone needing help.

In between the haircuts and the good deeds for the Boy Scouts, the spotter flights for the Civil Air Patrol, there was still more for Escarcega to do.

There was a time in the late 1940s that a young Chicano named Edward Roybal was thinking of running for the City Council. Escarcega was among those who encouraged him, launching Roybal into a long career of public service Downtown and in Washington, D.C.

Then, several veterans groups and area residents wanted a memorial to war veterans on a piece of land two blocks from Escarcega’s shop. He helped to persuade county officials that the Five Points monument was a good idea. Today, it is one of the Eastside’s best-known landmarks.

Not all of his efforts succeeded.

He twice worked for cityhood for East L.A. but by 1972 those campaigns had failed at the polls. And he tried to organize East L.A.’s 150 barbers into a cohesive organization to fight for standardized haircut prices and working hours, shop conditions and medical benefits.

More than 60 barbers came to the meetings in 1956 and ‘57, but the group never jelled. Personal work situations and petty jealousies doomed the budding East L.A. Barbers Assn.

Today’s activists on the Eastside credit Escarcega; those early attempts to empower the area have paid off. “He’s a leader of leaders,” says Frank Villalobos, who helped galvanize the campaign against the proposed Eastside state prison. “People still come to him with their problems and he listens.”

*

These days, Escarcega works three days a week at Mina’s Gentry on East Beverly Boulevard, and his work ethic hasn’t changed since those days with the pelones. The old-time Oster Lather machine still works. The talk is congenial. The manner is courteous. The cut is still good.

That’s the way it should be. And if anyone needs any help, with hair or anything else, he’s a good listener.

“He’s been there,” Villalobos said admiringly. “He knows.”