![]() Just like always."I had an uncle who was a barber. “Oh, the usual,” the bus driver will reply. ![]() “How mad do you want to make her?” Groh will ask Ruscio. He opened his shop down the street, installed a pool table and has been cutting the same heads of hair and asking the same questions ever since. Groh wound up cutting hair for Ralph Phillips at Crystal Barbershop in Spokane Valley, just down the street from where Groh’s is now.īut it didn’t take Groh long to get his own place going. Students not only learned the art of a good haircut and shampoo, but also how to give a clean shave, a lesson that’s been largely lost now that most hairstylists earn their licenses at cosmetology schools.īarber college graduates were required to apprentice for at least a year under an established barber. The school would try to get tavern patrons to pay a quarter or two for the trim, but if the subject refused, the haircut was a freebie. Students who showed up without a model in tow were dispatched to the BBB Beer Parlor and Card Room or the Crossroads Tavern to draft a subject, Groh said. He was expected to come to class with his own subject on whom to work. Moler Barber College, where Groh studied, was on a rough stretch of Main Avenue between Washington and Stevens streets, near Dutch’s Pawnshop. The Lilac City has no barber colleges now, but in the 1960s, when Groh learned the trade, Spokane had three schools. Breaking into the business meant attending barber college in Spokane. The setting at Kirstein’s influenced Groh so much he’d decided in eighth grade that barbering would be his profession. doesn’t just stand for barbershop,” Groh said. Frequented by most of the men in the community, the shop was the best place to pick up the local scuttlebutt. In 1950s Odessa there was only one barbershop, a one-chair operation where Del Kirstein cut hair. Groh has done his best to make the barbershop more than a place to get a haircut, which is the kind of shop he grew up around as a kid in Odessa, Wash., a town founded by German immigrant farmers from Odessa, Russia. He’d stripe the football field on his day off.” When I was superintendent of Freeman School District, and Tom lives in that district, if we had bleachers that needed an extra coat of paint, Tom was there to do it. “I would describe him as very thorough, a good, fun-loving person. Groh holds up his end of a conversation, but never expends a full sentence when a well-placed “yeah” or “uh-huh” will do. The barber can talk knowledgeably about everything from local sports lore to backcountry horseback riding and fishing, which isn’t to say he has the gift of gab men’s men seldom do. Tom Groh is a man’s man, said Charles Stocker, who first walked into Groh’s barbershop 35 years ago when Stocker was an administrator for Central Valley School District and worked two blocks down the street. Perhaps by chance, or shared interest, many of the men waiting for haircuts have coiffures that would fit the outdoorsmen in the reprints just fine. Each print portrays a clean-cut, wool-clad man roughing it with either gun or fishing rod in hand. There are reprints of vintage outdoorsman posters framed and hung on the walls of the waiting room. The heads of two respectable trophy deer, one downed by Tom Groh, the other by nephew and partner, Irv Groh, are positioned like bookends over the corners of the brick fireplace. ![]() A dozen nap-worthy, black leather chairs are spread out in a horseshoe formation around an art deco fireplace. The décor is sort of doctor’s waiting room meets urban hunting lodge. Groh’s shop is more than swivel chairs and disinfectant. For all the business I’ve done here, the community has given me so much more.” Groh just smiles when the matter of his tenure comes up. Even if I lived in Seattle, I’d get my haircut here.” ![]() I got two bad haircuts over there and started driving back to Spokane to see Tom. When I was working for the railroad, we moved to Puyallup for nine months. A myriad of other barbers who now compete with him earned their chops in his small, four-chair shop inside a converted stucco house. “How mad do you want to make her?” the barber asks, to which Ruscio replies that “the usual” will do just fine.Īt month’s end, Groh will have cut hair near the same intersection of Bowdish Road and Sprague Avenue for 40 years. Ruscio prefers it short, which makes Groh the King Solomon of combs and shears. She prefers Ruscio’s hair a little longer. Bus driver John Ruscio and barber Tom Groh have been having variations of the same conversation for the past 38 years.Įvery couple of weeks, Ruscio’s wife, Ellen, dispatches him to Tom’s Barber Shop on Bowdish Road for a little haircut.
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