Photo and story
by Dwain Hebda

Landmarks come in all shapes and sizes. Some are easy to find; they dominate town squares or loom majestically in nature or stand silent and dignified behind a brass plaque denoting their place in time and history.

Other landmarks, however, are harder to see, woven as they are into their neighborhoods, existing day to day as a thread in the fabric of a community. These are no less important for being subtle, burnished and smoothed with the passage of time.

Barber Service in Little Rock, and its proprietor Dick Mitchell, are just such landmarks.

“I got a customer been with me over 50 years,” Mitchell said. “I’ve had as high as four generations in one family.”

Even with the traditional barber pole by the front door, you couldn’t be blamed for missing the shop, a small single space amid larger, more garish neighbors in a nondescript shopping center. But stepping over its threshold is to take a step back through time when barber shops were more than a place to get a trim and a shave; they were where neighborhood guys congregated, swapped stories and discussed the news of the world, checking political correctness at the door.

“I’ve been coming here for 40 years, and I don’t feel that old, but I guess I am,” said customer Tim Laughlin. “You know, it may be longer than that because I started coming here in the early 1970s, so you do the math.”

Laughlin glances at Mitchell, and grins.

“I had black hair, but something on their equipment has turned it a little gray.”

Mitchell, who’s been orchestrating such conversations for 60 years, has done so on this spot for 52 of them. In that time, he’s cut hair on toddlers to centenarians-plus and every age in between. At 86, his is still producing a five-day workweek, Tuesday through Saturday.

“I need something to do,” he said, simply.

Mitchell was born into a farm family of eight children in Searcy. Orphaned at the age of 9, he was raised by his sister and entered the Navy in 1952.

“I made three roundtrips to Korea,” he said proudly.

After his military hitch ended, he was looking for something to do when his cousin Glenn Polk offered a suggestion.

“My cousin said he was going to Little Rock to see about going to barber school, and I said, ‘Well, I might as well go with you,’” Mitchell said. “It was Heaton Barber College in Downtown Little Rock; not there anymore.”

The cousins went into business together, not long after a former roommate and his wife rigged a blind date between Dick and Joy Whitten, a pretty, young nurse. That encounter led to the couple marrying in April 1962 in a small ceremony officiated by a preacher whose hair Dick tended. Two sons and two granddaughters have followed over the years as the riotous cacophony of photos stuck into the mirror at Mitchell’s workstation attest. But then, most everyone who came into the shop was some form of family, blood or not.

“I’ve seen a lot of boys who grew up through here,” said Susan Greeson who started cutting hair here a few years ago. “Boys who went to Holy Souls (School), grew up through Catholic High, go off to college and have their family come through here. Their dads brought them here when they were kids. Then they started bringing their kids here.”

Greeson’s arrival was big news in the history of the shop. Mitchell didn’t cut women’s hair and wasn’t looking to expand his repertoire; he just needed some help. Any woman taking on that role in one of the last true bastions of man-dom had to have thick skin, at least off the start, and Greeson fit the bill.

“It was different, but we got along pretty good soon as I started letting her do what she wanted to. We got along alright,” Mitchell said. “Some of the customers couldn’t tell the kind of jokes they’d been used to.”

“Dick and Susan can’t be beat,” Laughlin said. “This is an institution in this part of town. We’re going to miss Dick when he decides to hang up his scissors.”

That event came to pass this summer when Mitchell shut out the lights for the last time. Age and infirmity had ushered his cousin from the shop some time ago, and Mitchell himself had recently been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. The tremor in his left hand making it impossible for him to cut hair, he bowed out with customary grace and humor.

“Joy retired 10 or 12 years ago. She’s been wanting me to retire for 15 years,” he said with a gentle smile. “I didn’t have time.”