Eclectic chair

People call Murray a small town, but it seems big: several banks, a “McD's,” a Wal-Mart Super Center and loads of fast food joints.

But despite that, everybody seems to know everybody, no more so that at the Southside Barber Shop on South 12th Street.

The barbershop spans nearly 70 years. It changed hands a number of times, and in three days there, three different owners appeared: the current owner, Linda Hayden, 59; the previous owner, Donnie Kell, 68, who now cuts hair as his “retirement job;” and Walter Clay Wyatt, 74. He arrived in an electric wheelchair.

Getting to know people comes easily to Linda. She wanted to send a visitor from Maine home with a belly full of hushpuppies and catfish — and a Southern drawl.

“It's not the haircut, it's just a visit,” Linda said. “Some people just need someone to talk to. They can't talk at home. They can't talk to their spouse or whatever. But they can talk to their barber.”

She doesn't remember the name of every customer, but with few exceptions, she “knows them.” And she knows which barber cuts their hair. Everyone gets some variation of a clipper cut: a buzz, a flattop or a yet-named style requiring all the tools of the trade. Many patrons know the clipper blade size used on them, and barbers give new customers the number for use on future cuts.

Linda knows if they have kids, She knows if they recently went to the hospital. She knows if they have interesting jobs. She knows when to anticipate silly behavior from some exiting the barber chair.

And she knows how to play social director.

She generated a conversation between a blind man, Howard Bazzell, 92, and another patron, Charles Homra, 78, waiting for his haircut.

It turned out that the men coached baseball together back when their kids were kids. The conversation might never have happened between one with no sight and one soft-spoken.

Linda ensured the connection.

“I see a lot of local people that I don’t usually see, or would not see, if I had not come in, people I knew when I was growing up, as a kid,” said Allan Beane, 59. “And it’s good to see them, sometimes old friends of my parents. It’s good to see them.”

But sharing in all that life comes with a bittersweet edge.

Linda grows to care about many of the regulars, and if they die, she may never know it.

“You never know what's happened to them,” she said. “If their pictures is not in the paper, maybe you don't know their name,” she said. “But they haven't been coming in and you wonder ‘What happened to these people? Why haven’t I seen them?’ And nobody can ever tell you.”

That’s life — and death — in a small town.