After 62 years, barber hangs up the strap

When he was 17, Ray Gilmore decided to be a barber.

“I don’t know why. I just decided I wanted to be a barber,” he says.

He went to barber school in Portland, and came back to work in a local barbershop, cutting hair for 25 cents a person.

That was 62 years ago.

At 20 heads a day, that’s a lot of barbering — particularly if you include all the hours of conversation between each hair cut, shave, or face massage. (In recent years, Gilmore concedes, customers haven’t come to the barber for shaves and massages, but they still come for cuts and conversation.)

Earlier this month, Gilmore retired from cutting hair at Don’s Barber Shop, on Union Street, where he had worked for 13 years. His chair was third in a row of five, which sit before large mirrors and shelves of grooming supplies.

“We really influenced him here with our rudeness — which is completely good-natured,” adds shop owner Don Candage. And, then, with a laugh, he continues: “At first, his wife was going to come in and talk to us, because his character changed quite a bit after being with us.”

Across the room from Candage’s chair, the shop motto hangs proudly: “You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps.”

“Where he barbered before was mostly lawyers and doctors, so he was pretty quiet,” says Dana Crockett, who works at Don’s.

Crockett’s chair was next to Gilmore’s, and the two often bumped into each other while moving around seated customers. Between cuts, when the two had extra time on their hands, Gilmore might talk about his wife, Grace (a school teacher), war times, or his garden.

Gilmore grew hundreds of tomatoes each year, even though he didn’t like them, and took pride in raising the first peas of the season. Once, he proudly brought peas to work on July 1. Crockett jokingly accused Gilmore of buying them across the street at Doug’s Shop N’ Save. Gilmore didn’t say much, but, to prove his point, the next day he brought in a pea pod with leaves attached to it. “You can’t get that at Shop N’ Save,” he told Crockett.

When Gilmore began working at Don’s, he was hired because the shop needed another full-time barber. But Gilmore brought about 200 customers with him, says Candage with a chuckle. And it became standard that, after a hard day of work, on his way out the door, Gilmore would say, “Well, another day closer to death.”

In six decades of cutting hair, Gilmore saw a lot of changes in hair styles, but continued to offer the traditional barbershop fare, which he calls “the old-fashioned, regular haircut.” He has trimmed around the ears of fathers, and their sons and grandsons. Once, he even gave a cut to a 9-week-old baby.

These days, says Gilmore, long hair styles and stylists are taking over the barbershop — its red-white-and-blue spiraling poles, leather razor straps, tall containers of colored liquid, and neat cuts.

“I don’t like them,” Gilmore says of the long styles. “I don’t like the looks of them. Short hair styles look better on just about everybody.”

But the changes are not the reason for Gilmore’s decision to retire. He wants to spend time with Grace, and work more in his garden.

“At 79, it’s about time, I think,” he says.

His barbering buddies know they’ll see Gilmore often, however.

Says Crocket: “I told him when he left, `Hey, you’ll be back. You’ll need a haircut.’ ”