East Wallop's Tonsorial Artist
Created | Updated Jun 10, 2018
A tale from a long-ago barber shop. Did you ever wonder how people formed their opinions before the advent of social media? Here's a history lesson from the age before the 'Like' button.
East Wallop's Tonsorial Artist
by Helena Smith-Dayton1.
from Cartoons Magazine, July, 1917.
Jake Prue, the barber, gave a cosmopolitan touch to the town of East Wallop. He had an olive skin, wore a tiny black moustache and it was said he could talk French, Italian, and other allied languages2.
The social atmosphere of Jake's barber shop was so alluring that many persons
went clean-shaven who otherwise might have raised beards.
The gossip of East Wallop was clipped and trimmed in Jake's shop before the items blossomed in type and many subjects were discussed there that never got into the paper at all.
While this was a public institution including practically all of the male population, yet full-fledgcd membership consisted of ownership of a private shaving mug, adorned with initials or the owner's name, a badger brush, soap remnant, comb, and an open faced locker for the safe- keeping of these valuables. The blue list of East Wallop's gentry could he read by casting the eye over these pigeon holes.
You couldn't mention a place where Jake hadn't been. Why he'd been everywhere. It certainly was interesting to hear Jake go on, but if you ever noticed that while Jake could talk about places, and all sorts of queer folks that he'd met in his day, and tell the most hair-raising incidents, yet, somehow, you never seemed to acquire many real facts about Jake himself. He could be as close-mouthed as anybody. Some folks even went so far as to say that at some time, somewhere, Jake bad been married.
East Wallop women folks quickened their step in passing Jake's. They charged him with responsibility for the gossip which came out from time to time, and small bits of which men retailed. There were a few women who took their little boys to Jake's for their first Dutch cut, but these mothers entered with an air of timidity and hoped that they would escape before some man came in.
Robbie's mother cried two whole days before she led him to be sheared. Though Robbie hated his long blond curls, and aspired to be 'a little man' he screamed and hollered at the very sight of the scissors3. Apologetically his mother maintained that "he had never acted like that before."
Hours of waiting in Jake's shop were beguiled pleasantly with reading. Magazines you never
saw anywhere else and pink papers littered the place. Jake's was absolutely the worst place
in the world to start a continued story.
You could talk to people at Jake's that you wouldn't venture to speak to anywhere else. The atmosphere even humanized old Mr. Burbee of the Bank. He could shave notes but he couldn't shave himself. You could start an argument any time by merely suggesting the convenience of safety razors. Young Ralston Simms was not popular with Jake Prue because he was overheard to admit that he used one himself.
What Jake didn't know about baseball wasn't recorded in the year book. He would describe inside play with a wealth of detail, and he always gave the impression that he had been seated immediately behind the third-base foul line of a big national-league game the afternoon before. Jake always had his dope at fever heat in world's-series time and his post-mortem inquest brought up a maze of individual and team-batting averages when the hot-stove league went into executive session on cold winter evenings.
Yet, while Jake Prue was considered an authority on the war, baseball, local politics, the prize ring, and far away cities, as well as prominent persons he had shaved, no one credited him with appreciation of the one subject upon which he prided himself most – feminine beauty. He had actually been heard to declare that "little Emma Sawyer," the orphan who lived with old Mrs. Peck and worked for her board and clothes, was the prettiest girl in East Wallop.
"D'you mean to say that you think Emmer's better looking than Lou Sothergill?" demanded
Bud Silliby, proprietor of the "Beehive." Lou had long reigned belle of East Wallop.
"I certainly do!" declared the tonsorial4 Paris5. "Lou is good-looking all right, but she can't hold a candle to that little Emmer Sawyer."
"Why, Emmer's only a kid," depreciated Dave Smollins, the station agent. "It seems only yesterday when old Mrs. Peck got off the train with her and she looked like a little picked chicken."
"Emmer's been growing up lately," Jake observed, as he tried the edge of a razor.
"There's a lot of girls in this town who are a hundred times better-looking than that Sawyer girl." Lute Wizzley affirmed.
"Emmer," stated Jake deliberately, as the lather dried on an upturned countenance; "Emmer is as beautiful a girl as I've seen in all my travels, which are considerable. Even in cities I've rarely observed her equal."
"She's got good eyes,'' admitted someone, "now that I come to think of them."
"Eyes!" exclaimed Jake. "Why that girl has got reg'Iar stars in her head. Of course she hain't
learned how to use 'em – no trick stuff – but they're there. Yes, sir, they're there!"
"She has a fine color," contributed old Mr. Burbee. unexpectedly. "Sort of bloomy. But you must remember, Mr. Prue, that there's some remarkably beautiful young ladies in this town."
Mr. Burbee could silence an argument if he couldn't settle it. From that time on "the boys" delighted in getting Jake "going" on the subject of Emma. Everybody knew that his championship of the girl was not inspired by any personal interest. His was the attitude of the art critic not aspiring to ownership of a masterpiece, but singling it out for praise because of superior merit. Soon, everybody in town was staring at Emma as if they had never seen her before. Some, who prided themselves on being just, at least, admitted during heated arguments at Jake's that she had a few good points.
"It's her hair that Jake is taken with," pointed out Charlie Dobbins, the real estate man. "She's got enough to advertise a tonic. Perhaps –"
"I've noticed she has exceptionally good teeth," interrupted the East Wallop dentist.
Others credited to Emma Sawyer features, figure, youth, and personality.
"Don't you see," Jake would rave, "that altogether you admit Emmer has all the qualifications needful for beauty. What none of you can see is that she has got all of 'em at once. Why. man! She's a wonder – and not a soul in this place knows it but me – and I don't count. It's a tragedy. You give that girl the clothes and the money and the position that some girls in this town has got and she'd open your eyes."
One Saturday afternoon in early June, Jake's shop was filled with the usual crowd. The proprietor was too busy to talk, except to call out "NEXT!" from time to time. Ralston Simms entered and gave a general nod, shrugged his shoulders at the number ahead of him, and took up a position near the window.
"When d'you get back to town, Ralston?" asked some one.
"On the 2:10," he answered, gazing moodily into the street.
"Have a pleasant trip?" demanded another.
"Um-m-yes," he admitted, indifferently.
"Guess you find this town pretty tame after the places you visit," ventured a third.
Ralston Simms was the sort of person in East Wallop that humble and snobbish folks liked to mention in future conversations as: "Rally Simms was saying to me only this afternoon – "
Anything he might have said would have been treasured up and repeated. But when, suddenly, he said with an enthusiasm no one present had ever known him to display before, "There goes the prettiest girl in East Wallop," even the man whom Jake was working on struggled to get a look.
Tripping demurely past, carrying a loaf of bread, went Emma Sawyer!
There was a moment's silence. And then, every man in that shop but Jake Prue agreed heartily with Ralston Simms. Each one declared that HE had always thought Emma a beauty.
Jake Prue, listening, sighed. His taste was vindicated, true enough, but somehow he felt rather sorry not only for himself – but for Emma.
