The Real Cost of a Haircut

I was reminiscing with my two sons recently when the topic of our family vacations arose. By and large, they were happy affairs, with the exception of a trip to the Grand Canyon in their early teens when they spoke disrespectfully to their mother. I was never a yeller, nor a spanker, preferring nonviolent penalties, so I took them to a barber shop and had their long stylish locks trimmed off. They’ve treated their mother with respect ever since, though they are still annoyed with me and have told me that when it’s time to put me in a nursing home, I’m getting the one that smells like urine.

My father never took us to the barber shop for a punishment, because he never allowed us to have long hair in the first place. Once a month, on a Saturday morning, he loaded my three brothers and me into our Plymouth Valiant and hauled us to Buck’s Barber Shop on the north side of the square of Danville. Buck never asked us how we wanted our hair cut, since every boy in town had the same hairstyle: short all the way around, with whitewalls over and around the ears, a sprinkle of Clubman talc on the back of the neck to take away the itch, and a dab of Vitalis rubbed into the scalp for the shine. I have never felt so clean and fresh as I did after a Saturday morning at Buck’s.

As for our vacations, they were always the same: one week each summer in a Sears and Roebuck blue canvas tent at Pokagon State Park in Indiana. This was before campgrounds were filled with RVs worth more than some homes. Every campsite, in addition to a tent, had three amenities: a picnic table made by the inmates at the state prison, a rope strung from one tree to another to use as a clothesline, and a steel fire ring with a cooking grate. Firewood was brought from home or purchased at a farmhouse outside the park gates for 50 cents a bundle. Meals were cooked on a green Coleman stove set up on the picnic table. Breakfast was pancakes, lunch was a fried bologna sandwich with ketchup, and supper was fish we’d caught that day. Unless we hadn’t caught any, then it was more bologna.

There were no bathhouses or showers, just several pit toilets within walking distance of the camp site, which were seldom used except in an emergency since it was easier to pee behind a tree. I wanted nothing to do with the pit toilets so would walk the mile to the Potawatomi Inn, stroll in like I owned the place, pretending to be a guest, and poop to my heart’s content.

At night there’d be a campfire and ghost stories about escaped convicts from the same state prison where the picnic tables had been made, who slice their way into tents in the dark of night, tie up the parents, and sell the children to the carnival. These many years later, carnivals still terrify me, and I avoid them whenever possible, though my wife says that once the carnival people got to know me, they’d give me back.

I’m not even sure to whom they would give me back. My sons are still mad at me from the Mean Haircut Vacation, and my wife, taking advantage of my absence, would have assumed a new name and moved to a distant city. Embittered by life, I would turn to crime and be imprisoned in my very own cell with its very own bathroom, a vast improvement over the nursing home my sons have planned for me.

Philip Gulley is a Quaker pastor and author of 22 books, including the Harmony and Hope series, featuring Sam Gardner.

This article is featured in the July/August 2025 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.