Shop talk and barber’s tools

Don Traurig EVAN WILLIAMS / FLORIDA WEEKLY The sensation of a wickedly sharp straight-razor pulling warm shaving cream down the back of your neck is one of life’s more subtle thrills and most satisfying experiences. It’s a grace note to the clipping and buzzing and a complement to the easy-going conversation.

Of course, it takes a sure and steady hand, like Don Traurig’s. Following in the footsteps of his late grandfather, a barber from Cincinnati, 79-year-old Mr. Traurig was cutting a well-known customer’s hair Monday morning. It was quiet in the shop.

“How are you, Ron?” Mr. Traurig asked. “Is it cool enough (outside) for you?”

“Yes,” said Ron, an older gentleman with a low wave of white-blonde hair on top.

“What are you up to?” “Just playing golf.”

“Playing golf in this cool weather?”

Ron nodded. “I think it’s going to be cooler this week,” he said.

“Oh yeah, all week.”

An old Magnavox television with a digital converter box played a rerun of a popular detective show on USA. Dialogue from the day-time drama — “It’s a damn trap, Henry! …I don’t like surprises” — mingled with the shop talk as it moved toward family matters.

“My grandson plays in a band up there,” Ron was saying.

“What does he play?” “Drums.”

Mr. Traurig was quiet for a moment.

“Every time I come in here, Glenn, you’re gone,” Ron said to one of the other barbers. “What the hell’s wrong with you? You got bankers’ hours? So, how’ve you been?”

“I’ve been doing fine,” Glenn said. “It’s a little chilly out there.”

A Norman Rockwell calendar near Mr. Traurig’s barber chair was turned to January 2010. Mr. Rockwell’s sweet, nostalgic picture of a doctor and a little girl seemed to sum up a lot of the feelings you might have if you were to walk into an oldfashioned barber shop like this one.

Mr. Traurig turned the fourth-generation business over to his son in 1996. Now he works part-time, and the neon sign in the window became Doug’s Barber Shop. It’s been in Fort Myers since 1968, now located across the street from the Edison Mall near the back of the Miracle Plaza.

After he finished serving in the Air Force, stationed in Panama City, Mr. Traurig moved back to Cincinnati and went to barber school. He worked for the family business there before moving to Fort Myers with his wife and raising four boys.

One obvious difference between his shop now, and the one he grew up around, are the tools. For instance, the blades on the straight razors are detachable, not sharpened on a strop. In the old Cincinnati shop, there were spittoons filled with masticated chewing tobacco, personal shaving mugs that customers left to hold their combs, and a man who shined shoes.

A few of his grandfather’s old clippers, sharpening strops and razors are hung up on the wall near the television. Like the tools, many of Mr. Traurig’s customers are also from the past. Some were swept away in time and others still help make the shop what it is.

One boy, Mr. Traurig remembers, used to take his water bottle and squirt his mother with it. He ended up becoming a Navy pilot. Some are men he used to coach on a Little League team, or their children. Time keeps passing.

“I’ve still got a few customers that were from over at the Edison Mall,” he said. “Most of the others have died off.”

He remembers the Navy pilot well.

“I used to cut his hair when he was yay high,” the blue-eyed barber said. “His mother still sends me a Christmas card every year.” 