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"Smoke, Hair, and Aftershave"

If you remember, last week we left off with:

"Yes Laramie had done the amazing. But then he did the unthinkable."

And now lets continue:

Laramie's irresponsible activities soon destroyed the business he had worked so hard to build.

During the summer and the following couple years I would go to visit Millie, and occasionally all of our family would go over or they would come visit us. While I was at their house I could see Mary was very torn up over Laramie’s activities.

Eventually Laramie felt he needed to start over and he and the entire family left town, I assume to invade another relative's home in another state and town. That was the last time I saw or heard from Millie for many years until we both by chance signed up for the same college in North Dakota 4 years later.

As the tornado that was Laramie and his family blew out of town, Laramie left 3 cleaning contracts for barber shops to my father. We always needed the extra money so every night my father and I would clean barbershops.

A new adventure, a new chapter, and a new beginning.

The barbershops had a distinctive odor, a mixture of smoke, hair crème, aftershave, and cut hair. Every night my father and I would clean the barbershops and we soon fell into a routine. When I walked in the door I would empty ashtrays and change the sand, straighten magazines, dust shelves and chairs and start on the mirrors.

My father would sweep the floor and then the last thing was to mop ourselves out the front door. The mop was the heavy work so my father always did that and I got to just watch as we finished up and then locked up the front doors. The owners had trusted my father with a key to their shops.

I did not get paid for my work, nor did I even expect to. But dad would usually take me over to the Sheridan Inn or another restaurant after we finished for a cup of hot chocolate while he drank coffee. That time with him was payment enough.

Occasionally we would find money on the floor, a dime or so, and I was instructed to always lay it up on the counter since it did not belong to us. I even remember a couple occasions when the barbers had left the cash register unlocked with money in it and dad called to announce it to them. The owners had rushed down and secured the money.

Two of the barbershops were next to bars. The White Barbershop was next to one bar that was very active on the first of each month. We had to go out the back door behind the barbershop to dump the trash.

But there was always something very disturbing behind the barber shop that I had to step over, very disturbing indeed.

Click here to go to chapter 21