“Bye, Bye Blue” and other 50’s memories of barber shops and soda fountains in Daydreaming on the Porch

First was the Katz & Besthoff (or K&B) Drugstore down the street from where I lived at the corner of Jefferson Highway. It was here that we kids would have those wonderful Cherry Cokes — Cokes dispensed from a fountain in a glass that had cherry syrup at the bottom. That was a real treat on hot summer days. Cherry Cokes of today just can’t compare.

The second business was a small grocery store across the street from the school I attended. It was here that we could stock up on tart straw-sugar candy, miniature wax bottles of fruit-flavored juice, and, or course, baseball and other cards with bubble gum sheets inside.

Finally, between the drugstore and the snackshop was the barbershop. Some of the keenest memories I have of my growing status as a soon-to-be teenager are of this establishment where I’d proceed, by myself at age 9 or 10, to get my crewcut. You could hear 50s staples on the small radio on the counter — songs by Brenda Lee, Pat Boone, Patsy Cline, and those classics by the Ray Conniff and Bert Kaempfert orchestras.

To this day I love to hear those songs. They take me back to the golden era of childhood as surely as any other memory-triggering device. “Bye, Bye Blue” by Bert Kaempfert might be playing in the background while the electric clippers buzzed off broad swaths of our raggeddy hair. Or, we’d patiently wait our turn, flipping through “grown-up” magazines such as Argosy and Field and Stream. I remember those two most because they were in just about every old-fashioned barbershop I’ve ever been in.
Well-thumbed copies of “Look” magazine and “The Saturday Evening Post” were also strewn about on chairs or stuffed in magazine racks with their covers about to come off.

Yes, it was almost like a Norman Rockwell painting. To city-raised kids, pictures of deer hunting and trophy-sized freshwater bass were as exotic as scenes from an African safari (this was in pre-political correctness days, remember). Occasional conversation, the pleasing clippity-clip of scissors, the sound of the razor being sharpened on leather (I guess that’s what it was) — all were noted and stored away in my memory.

That barbershop pole out front with its moving stripes is a vanishing symbol of America in simpler times. You can still find them, but they’re harder to come by. It would be a sad thing if that barbarshop experience was lost as a ritual of childhood. It’s irreplaceable.