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McCook barber, known for flat tops, turns 100
CORRECTION - An incorrect date for the reception was printed in the print edition of this article. The reception for Mr. Mohr is Saturday, April 15 from 2-4 p.m. at the Heritage Senior Center in McCook.
McCOOK, Neb. — Carl Mohr never met a head of hair he didn’t like.
Although the long-time McCook barber is turning the century mark April 19, he’s still as sharp as a straight edge razor, remembering dates and addresses and not mincing words.
“I gave Ben Nelson his first hair cut, he was so small we had to put a board across the chair,” he said of the former U.S. Senator who grew up in McCook. “He was just an average kid. What does that tell you?”
Mohr was a barber in McCook for 65 years, cutting the hair of other McCook citizens who later became Nebraska governors, Ralph Brooks and Frank B. Morrison.
“Brooks, he was a quiet fellow, he was the superintendent of schools here before he became governor,” he said. “Morrison? A little different, but a nice old boy.”
Mohr said he always wanted to be a barber, beginning when he first shined shoes as a boy in a Chester, Neb., barbershop. “They looked like they were having a lot of fun,” he said of his choice of occupation. There were no jobs during the Depression when he finished high school, so Mohr shocked grain for an uncle for 30 days, earning $50. That still wasn’t enough for the $150 tuition at Lincoln, Neb. barber college. (“1020 P Street,” he recalled the address firmly.)
“The guy told me, ‘just give me the $50 and you’ll work off the rest,’” Mohr said. That he did, in three weeks time earning the coveted front chair and not giving it up until he graduated.
He arrived in McCook in 1939 (May 18, to be exact, Mohr said), 22 years old with a quarter in his pocket and responding to an opening he heard at Seymour’s Barber Shop, located behind DeGroff’s Department Store. Since the hotel room cost 25 cents a night, he asked for and got a $2.50 advance from his new boss and rented a room down the street for $2 a week. “Hell, I had to eat,” he explained.
The deal the barber shop owner offered Mohr was either a take-home pay of 60 percent of what he made or $12 per week guaranteed. He took the $12.
Haircuts were 30 or 35 cents, depending on what barber you used. (Cuts were more expensive on the west side of main street, he said.) A shave, with a straight edge razor, was 20 cents. “A dollar could buy you a lot back then,” he said.
Later, he became the only barber at the McCook Army Airbase during World War II.
He was known as a fast barber, Mohr said, taught by his teacher to give a haircut under three minutes.
This came in handy at the airbase, where at its peak housed nearly 15,000 service men training to be bomber pilots.
He recalled one time being timed by the service men to see how many haircuts he could do in an hour. Mohr thinks he did about 12. “But that included getting them into the seat and out,” he clarified.
By 1947, he owned his own shop on Norris Avenue. He never did anything fancy, Mohr said, just kept to the basics. And his fast style of cutting flat-tops worked for a lot of people, he said.
“Farmers wanted to get in, get out, as fast as possible,” he said. “And if you worked on pop, you worked on the whole family.” Except for women’s haircuts.
“It was just too much hair to mess with,” he said.
Mohr estimated that at one time, McCook had up to 11 barbershops, with one or two barbers per shop. It was flat-tops all the way, until the late 1960s, when long hair became fashionable for men.
“When that long hair came in, it was terrible. Still is, as long as I’m concerned, it doesn’t do men any justice.”
He retired in 2005 after he injured a shoulder pulling up a garage door.
But once a barber, always a barber: he keeps the tools of his trade nearby, the shaving brush and electric clippers still kept in the bathroom and a comb always handy in his pants pocket.
A reception for Mohr’s birthday is Saturday, April 15, 2-4 p.m., at the Heritage Senior Center in McCook.