The banter started fast, moments after Bob Gifford draped the candy cane-colored cape over the front of Dave Holt.
“Dave had hair when he first came in,” Gifford said last week. “Now I have to create the illusion of hair.”
Both men laughed.
Neither Gifford, who’s been a barber downtown since Carl Yastrzemski was a kid playing left field at Fenway Park, nor Holt, president of a locksmith company 1½ miles south, knew precisely how long this follicle friendship had been going on. At least 40 years. Maybe 45.
That means we don’t know for sure if President Richard Nixon had resigned the first time barber and customer met. A sure thing is that Woolworth’s had a coffee shop with a soda fountain, right there on Main Street, where dozens of local employees stopped by for lunch.
And a cop, 100 yards or so from Gifford’s Pleasant Street business, was needed on Friday nights to help the large groups of people cross the street in what Gifford called a “thriving city.”
And through it all, through the wars and the presidents and the cultural changes and the coming and going of long sideburns and long hair, Gifford has been clipping and combing and shaving, with a striped barber’s pole outside and an old swivel chair that needs new upholstery but still spins pretty well.
This has been his business, his life, his passion since the mid-1960s. He moved to his current location in ’71.
“Always upbeat,” Holt said, referring to the man snipping on his silver hair. “He’s done a great job.”
“Oooh,” said Gifford, “maybe this one will be free.”
And so it went, an airy dialogue that began decades ago and still goes on at the former home of the Concord Athletic Club, before it became the Downtown Athletic Club. Back in the 1970s, you could go there and play hoops, then have a beer, then get a trim, all in the same place.
Those other places, the court and the bar, are long gone. Gifford, a 1953 Concord High graduate who spent four years in the Air Force, doesn’t know how much longer he’ll cut hair. He’s 83 and works Wednesday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
“Not yet,” Gifford said, when asked about retirement. “When I get up and say it’s time to stay home, I’ll stay home. It’s week-to-week, month-to-month.”
The staircase to his second-floor shop is steep with lots of steps, and in fact Gifford had trouble navigating the final two steps recently and missed a month of work. He bruised his already-arthritic right knee. Hurt his hip, too.
His customers stuck with him, however. First, he joked, telling me, “Once you’re accustomed to a bad haircut, you don’t know any better.”
Then he got serious, describing the intimate and often long-lasting relationship that forms when someone puts their hair in someone else’s hands.
As Gifford told me, “Changing barbers is like changing doctors.”
He used to cut Holt’s father’s hair, back when Gifford worked for Seth Prescott on Warren Street, before opening his own business on Pleasant. That’s what happens when you know what you’re doing, both with a pair of scissors and your mouth.
You stay in business. Be smart when discussing politics. In fact, you’d be wise to totally steer clear of the subject. Or at least stay neutral. Gifford learned from Prescott in the 1960s to put a Concord Monitor in the waiting area and the New Hampshire Union Leader.
He listens to NPR and gave me a glimpse inside his political DNA, telling me he voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary two years ago, and he trusted neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton.
Yet he’s smart enough to know that discussing President Trump or Clinton, both the positive stuff and the negative stuff, is not a good idea.
“If I’m going to work on someone’s head one-on-one, you got to be able to talk to them,” Gifford said. “Cutting hair is only part of it. You have to b.s. your way through it.”
He continued: “Once in a while you have to confront someone. I put the scissors down so there’s no injury. I might say, ‘Now look, you have an opinion and your voice keeps rising. My hearing is fine, so if you don’t stop, this haircut is over.’ ”
During the 1976 primary, Gifford met Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, both of whom climbed the stairs into his shop. Imitating the former first lady’s Southern accent, Gifford said, “She asked, ‘Would you donate figh dollahs?’ ”
“Carter was a gentleman,” Gifford added.
Sports, of course, are better for this mix of banter, tamer than politics. Gifford was there cutting hair when Bobby Orr led the Bruins to a pair of Stanley Cup titles in the 1970s and when Larry Bird won three NBA championships with the Celtics in the ’80s. Earlier this month he thought Tom Brady was “aging.”
And, of course, there are the customers, loyal as Lassie, who “like to irritate me,” Gifford said.
The guy who snorts clippings from his nose. The guy who must come in at 3 p.m., a time which is non-negotiable. The guy who never stops moving his head during this delicate procedure. The guy who burps.
And there are the funny people, whether they know it or not, like the old guy who thinks he’s talking to Gifford but instead is actually conversing with his voicemail message. He’s 94, the last of Gifford’s house calls.
Holt plays it pretty straight, a quiet guy who’s engaging when a columnist and photographer ambush him for a story.
Gifford said the company Holt once worked for, before buying the business himself and opening Adams Lock and Safe, “was great.”
“Was?” Holt fired back.
Holt has four daughters. His oldest is 42, meaning she was born in the early days of this normally off-the-record neighborhood bull session.
Those were the days when Gifford offered a hot shave, softening the stubble with a hot towel, and he’s still got the fossils at his shop to prove it. The straight razor. The stone for sharpening the blade. The leather strop to straighten and polish the blade. That’s the strip of leather you see now and then hanging from a barber’s chair.
Gifford’s is still there, hanging. So is that identifiable colored pole outside, a cylinder that looks like a blend of ice cream, with layers of red, white and blue.
Gifford was asked again about retirement, but, like Patriots star Rob Gronkowski, remained cagey. Or perhaps he simply doesn’t know.
He finished Holt’s haircut, a trim on his silver circle of hair. He brushed off excess hair and powdered Holt’s neck.
The phone rang. On the other end was a longtime customer, the grandson of an early Gifford Client.
“Gifford’s Barber Shop,” the barber said. “How ya doing, Pat? Friday the 15th? Yep. Got you down. See you then.”