I was surfing around about them and ran across an article.
Time seems to move slowly inside Jockey Club Barber Shop.I always found places like this to be the american dream. A place where people go to get a service and customers end up becoming friends. A place where customers end up spending half the day hanging out shooting the shit about various things. A place where everyone knows someone that knows something about something you may need. I know there are still places around that are like even what some movies portray such as the movie "The Barbershop" and "Radio" lol.
The four barbers consider themselves brothers, and the customers as friends. Friends are encouraged to stay and chat, to catch up on their Dallas Cowboys trivia and to discuss who missed church last week.
"We're all friends. We just laugh and talk and enjoy one another," said 75-year-old J.C. Page, who has been getting his hair cut once a week at the Jockey Club since 1979.
The Jockey Club, a little brick building on Elm Avenue, is an old-fashioned barbershop, a piece of the American landscape cluttered in recent years by chain shops and salons, writes the author of a new book about barbershops.
"The good news is there are thousands of them still out there," writes Vince Staten in the introduction to the book Do Bald Men Get Half-Price Haircuts?In Search of America's Great Barbershops. "Supercuts, Fantastic Sam's and the chain shops haven't put all the old barbers out of business. Not like hippie hairstyles did back in the '60s and '70s."
But good, old-fashioned barbershops are hard to discern from other places that offer haircuts, he said.
"What makes for a great barbershop? To begin with, it can't be called a style shop," he said in the book.
"The barbershop is the community center in many places. That community may be an entire small town or neighborhood. Or it may just be a community of like-minded folks."
Community is what the Jockey Club owners have always had in mind, said Benny Frank Smith, the shop's 73-year-old owner who has been cutting hair there since 1944.
Smith's grandfather opened the shop in 1920 on the bottom floor of a three-story building at Second Street and Franklin Avenue. It was named "Jockey Club" after a line of beauty and hair-care products that the building owner's wife spotted in Chicago, he said.
Soon, Smith's uncle took over the business. When he went to World War II, the shop remained open. Smith took over in 1951.
Back in "the old days," barbers knew each other well and even formed a local organization that met once a month to discuss the business and new styles, Smith said.
Now, he said, he hardly knows any of the barbers in town, especially the younger ones.
Prices have gone up, too. A haircut at Jockey Club in 1944 cost 35 cents. Today, it costs $8 or more.
A few celebrities, including baseball great Jackie Robinson, have stopped in for haircuts, Smith said. And generations of families have remained loyal to Jockey Club, a place they've always considered more of a social hall than a barbershop.
"Back in those days (the 1940s), I remember my uncle had a big fig tree in back of the barbershop," he said.
"(The barbers and customers) played dominoes ... all the time when they were not cutting hair. Then they'd talk about sports, like baseball and football, the presidential election, the mayor."
The shop still maintains a sense of community.
They don't play dominoes anymore, but the other three Jockey Club barbers, Jesse Mayes, Lloyd Dugas and Cicero Martin, joke with customers every day about girlfriends and talk seriously about sports.
Representatives of churches, clubs and charities stop in almost daily because they know these guys will help them raise money. The barbers admit they can't pass up pizzas and hot wings being sold for a good cause, especially from loyal customers.
Kevin Mims, 23, falls into that category. A third-generation Jockey Club customer, he has been getting haircuts there since he was a child.
He lives in Mexia, but he still drives to Waco so Mayes can cut his hair.
While he is there, he talks about his family. But that can be odd, he said, because the barbers tell him they know everything about him.
After serving in the Marine Corps for five years, Mims said he much prefers going to his barber for a haircut because of the time and care Mayes takes.
"I'm just used to it," Mims said.
But then he thought of another reason and grinned at his barber.
"You can learn a lot when you hang around older people," he said.
Are there any around here that any of you visit on a regular basis?
