Joe Spadi gingerly snipped the hair around a customer’s ear as he told of the day he gave a bear a haircut.
The story has a familiar ring, like a joke too quirky to go stale: A hearse arrived outside his barbershop, and a guy got out with a 600-pound bear. He entered and asked Spadi to give the animal a haircut.
Instead of delivering a punch line, Spadi pointed to a picture of a wary-eyed bruin in a barber’s chair, a white smock cinched around his neck as a much younger Spadi stands by, scissors at the ready.
“He was right here in the second chair,” Spadi said, motioning to his right. “He had a halter on him, and he was trained.”
So Spadi clipped the animal’s bristly head and a photographer snapped pictures that Spadi said later appeared on a television show, “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” which aired in the 1980s.
At 82, Spadi is retiring, leaving behind the corner at East Alameda Avenue and South Downing Street where he spent 53 years cutting hair.
In 1952, the year he opened his first shop across the street from his present location, a horse named Hill Gail won the Kentucky Derby, a haircut cost 25 cents and the Denver metro area’s population was about 600,000.
Today, the Denver area is home to more than 2 million people, and unisex hair salons have put a casually hip face on the once masculine and conservative barbershop.
Barbers like Spadi are a vanishing breed, said Darlene Davis, director at Antoine Du Chez Hairdressing Academy in Glendale.
“There is a special thing about barbers. In a traditional barbershop, they take time to get to know the client.”
Large companies such as Regis Corp., which owns or operates 10,698 salons such as MasterCuts and Supercuts around the world, dominate the business.
At Floyd’s Barbershop off the 16th Street Mall on Champa Street, the sign in the window says “Old School New Style.” Inside, young barbers, some tattooed and pierced, cut hair at a line of eight chairs. A Guns N’ Roses CD blares, and customers surf the Internet.
Spadi’s style is undiluted old school – he wears a white shirt tucked into pants that are at once both creased and rumpled. The row of leather chairs where generations of customers have waited their turn beneath the shears were new when he first went into business.
Fading pictures of race horses hang on the cinder-block walls, and a wooden radio that was out of fashion long before Hill Gail won the Derby sits on a shelf. On the wall, a yellowed sign declares: “Expert Ladies Hair Cutting.”
Cutting hair has been his livelihood, but Spadi’s passion has been the winner’s circle.
He and his wife, Mable, bought thoroughbreds – more than 20 before they were through – and raced them at tracks throughout the U.S. The nag he remembers most fondly was named Jody’s Miracle, in honor of his daughter, Jody Quintana, now 49.
“He was the best one in the state. He was across the finish line, and the others were still running,” he said of the horse.
Over the years, Spadi and his customers have discussed everything from horse flesh to birth, death, war and peace.
Jim Johnson, one of Spadi’s customers for the past 10 years, admires the barber’s conversational style.
“It is the perfect level of conversation – not too deep, not too trite. He is not going to say a word unless you say something,” said Johnson, a co-owner of Johnson Storage & Moving Co. in Centennial.
Sometimes, Spadi said, a barbershop conversation led him to an opportunity. A customer would mention that a parent had died or was moving. “I would say, ‘What are you doing with the property?”‘
He bought homes in the Washington Park neighborhood for as little as $10,000, then collected rent on the properties.
As the neighborhood became more popular, he was able to make staggering profits on some of his acquisitions.
He sold one property recently that cost him $17,000 for $380,000.
He still owns a few homes in the neighborhood and has told Jody, his only child, to hold onto them, in spite of the problems that go with being a landlord.
“I wouldn’t sell because there is only so much property and no more land,” he said. “But it is a big headache when you try to collect the rent.”
These days, Spadi walks with a shuffle and his frail hands tremble. When he recalls the jolt to the heart that laid him flat as he walked in Washington Park two years ago he still sounds shocked.
“All of a sudden my legs went up in the air, and my gosh! I should have been gone.”
A pacemaker keeps his weakened heart beating, and doctors say he has a few good years left, he said. But he has decided it is time to give up working five days a week.
He will move to Kentucky with his daughter and her family after he retires at the end of this month.
“I am sure going to miss it,” he said, the smooth click of the scissors falling quiet. “I cut a lot of heads of hair.”
Staff writer Tom McGhee can be reached at 303-820-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com.
Then and now
The hair-cutting business has changed since 1952, when Joe Spadi opened his barbershop in Denver. A comparison of some average prices from then and now:
Haircut price at Joe’s
1952: 25 cents
Today: $12
Annual wages for hairstylist
1952: $2,766
Today: $23,000 to $50,000
Bottle of shampoo
1952: 60 cents
Today: Up to $8
20 razor blades
1952: 79 cents
Today: $5.20
Source: Denver Post research
JOHN WENZEL
Wit and wisdom
With 53 years in the hair-cutting business, past ownership of a string of race horses and a part-time career in real estate behind him, Joe Spadi has these tips and observations:
On being a barber: “My daughter wanted to become a barber, and I told her, ‘No, don’t do that. It is a bad profession; it wears out your hips.”‘
On real estate values in Washington Park: “It is sure an improvement,” on recently selling a property that cost him $17,000 for $380,000.
On horse racing: “It is only for real wealthy people. I did it with real estate. … One without the other is not that good.”
On the bear he gave a hair cut: “He never came back.”
