Word: barber
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...miscalculation of one percentage point in the unemployment rate would throw off the House budget figures by more than $25 billion-a loss of $20 billion in revenues and an automatic increase of $5 bil lion to $7 billion in unemployment bene fits. Conceded New York Republican Congressman Barber Conable, a member of the Budget Committee: "There is a substantial aura of make-believe about our prognostications." After the House vote, the budget battle moved to the Senate, where Ernest Hollings of South Carolina has succeeded Edmund Muskie as chairman of the Bud get Committee. A staunch supporter of increased...
Such logic worked often enough that Marvy began to think of manufacturing barber poles, not just selling them. In January 1950 he opened his own factory. At the time there were five other barber-pole makers in the country: two in Chicago, one in St. Louis, one in Los Angeles and a small one in Winston-Salem, N.C. Marvy and circumstances gradually put them out of business. A man who could have foreseen the long-hair rebellion of the mid-'60s might not have put his money into barber poles then. But by 1967 Marvy's factory, working...
There were about 112,000 barber shops in the U.S. in 1967, says Marvy, and there are only about 90,000 now. A limited additional market exists on Navy ships and overseas (there is also a competitor overseas; the only other barber-pole factory Marvy knows of in the world is in Japan). The popularity of poodle-grooming salons, though perhaps a sign of societal decay, has helped Marvy's sales; his poodle pole (wall mounted, and too high to be of any practical interest to a dog) has a row of poodles on one of the stripes...
...year to something under 1,000, at $335 for the highest-priced model. Does this mean that the William Marvy Co. is as shaky as the Chrysler Corp.? Certainly not. "We just had our first million-dollar year," says Marvy, marveling. Part of that million is inflation, but the barber-pole business seems more secure than most. The little factory could use a new deck of cards in the room where everyone plays rummy at lunchtime, but otherwise things are shipshape...
William Marvy leans on an antique barber chair, whose cracked leather he has replaced with Naugahyde ("a fine product"). It is one of the grand old cast-iron, nickel-plated thrones made by the Emil J. Paidar Co. of Chicago. Paidar also made barber poles and, until it went out of business in the early '70s, was one of Marvy's last competitors. Before meeting Marvy, a visitor imagines someone like the last buffalo hunter, a badlands bad man left over from the century before, gloomily waiting for the great herds to come again. But Marvy sees himself...