Word: barber
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...barber would unlock the door of his shop at 7 a.m. or so-early, because it was an important ceremony of his day to shave the important and self-important men of the town, whose gold-lettered mugs stood splendidly on the shelf above the mirror. Then he would hang up his straw hat and suit coat and raise his window shades. After that he would put on his barber coat, and, finally, he would step outside his shop with the key for winding up his spring-driven barber pole motor. When the twisted red, white and blue stripes began...
...those spring-wound models are old stuff, and William Marvy, who operates the last barber-pole factory in the U.S., is not impressed. When one of those clockwork barber poles comes into his shop in St. Paul for repairs, he sends it back electrified. Marvy, 70, has been in the business for 55 years, and he has been up to date every step of the way. This up-to-dateness is itself a kind of spring-wound relic: the breezy, bet-on-the-future confidence of a Midwestern traveling salesman from a half-century...
...three Dutch Masters cigars and a ballpoint pen in the breastpocket of his suit. But it isn't hard to change the ballpoint to a fountain pen, erase a few facial lines and see him as a 25-year-old self-employed salesman, striding into a two-chair barber shop in some one-horse Minnesota town. "Keep up with the times," he would say, unpacking samples of Tiger Root and Pinaud's Lilac Vegetal. "Look to the future. Have a cigar...
...inked into his order book, he would make the big try. "Now, you're an intelligent man," he would admit to the proprietor, "and you might say dollars don't come easy, and why should I spend mine on one of these new, illuminated, revolving, high-visibility barber poles? And you'd be absolutely right; everyone knows where your shop is. But sometimes a reminder will make a man buy before he really needs to. For instance, you might be walking down the street without any idea of being thirsty, and suddenly you see a sign that...
Despite the uncertainties, Randy Barber said, "Unions are asking questions far more than when we wrote the book," adding, "The real impetus for these studies and the changes you're starting to see is coming from local and state union officers." An Operating Engineers Local in south Florida has put up $2 million to offer its members home mortgages. In Southern California, the Building and Trades union is contemplating a program to target pension money for building houses, apartment buildings and shopping centers. The construction trades have always had exceptional influence over pension funds because of the unstable nature...