Mon 12 Jan 2015
COLLECTING PULPS: A Memoir, Part 13, by WALKER MARTIN: Barbershops and Magazines.
Posted by Steve under Collecting , Columns , Magazines[14] Comments
Barbershops and Magazines
by Walker Martin
NOTE: The following may contain risqué and objectionable memories, but it also explains some of the factors and events that led to me being a pulp magazine collector.
In 1956 and 1957 I worked in a barber shop as a teenager in high school to earn some money. I needed more than my $1.50 weekly allowance to buy the SF digests and paperbacks. So every Saturday evening I would show up at the barbershop and clean it. The barber paid me a $1.50 for a couple hours work which consisted of dusting, sweeping, cleaning the mirrors, and waxing the floor. Easy work.
But the interesting thing was the guys who would show up after hours to have their hair cut by appointment only. Officially the shop was closed at 5:00 pm but many working men couldn’t go during the day to have hair cuts, so the barber worked after hours only by appointment.
These guys were a rough group and they didn’t want to read The Saturday Evening Post and True which were out for the women and men with their sons to read during the day. One of my responsibilities was to take care of the magazines in the back room and put them out Saturday night for the after hours men.
The pulps were dead by 1956 but the men’s magazines were thriving. The back room had copies of Playboy, Nugget, and other similar titles. Many of the men were WW II and Korean war vets and they loved the men’s magazines showing Nazis partying with nude girls on the covers.
Nothing really objectionable but hot by 1950’s and 1960’s standards. I once asked the barber why he didn’t have these magazines out during the day and he laughed, saying that the mothers would raise hell if they saw their kids looking at pictures of girls without clothes, etc.
As a 14 year old, I was fascinated by these magazines and often looked through them quickly in the back room. Sometimes I stayed too long and the barber and his friends would start yelling at me to come back and sweep the floor. They laughed and wanted to know what I was doing back there. I can’t even repeat some of the stories I heard them talking about.
To just give you a flavor of the risqué discussions I will mention that they had a rating system for the girls that would perform oral sex. The best was a girl who had a set of false teeth she would take out and put on the dashboard of the car. I guess having no teeth made her the best performer. The only problem was that several of the men thought this was hilarious and couldn’t stop laughing during the sex act.
Handling and quickly looking through these magazines made me into the fiction magazine collector that I am today. I started collecting back issues of digest SF and crime magazines. Then I soon started collecting the pulps. Mainly the SF titles like Astounding, Unknown, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, etc.
Years later, I started to collect Playboy, Nugget, Rogue, and some other titles. The fiction and some of the jazz music articles are still of interest but the photos of girls look pretty tame by today’s standards.
Next door to the barbershop was a small second hand bookstore run by an old man. He had tons of pulps piled up but all I was interested in was the SF magazines and the men’s magazines. He eventually died and all the magazines were thrown into garbage trucks. The store became a candy shop selling penny candy.
What happened to Jerry the barber? He died an early death from cancer. He was a smoker and only in his 40’s. The funny thing was that when my father was dying from cancer, he told me one day to ask Jerry to come out to the house and cut his hair. I never thought of barbers making house calls but I guess they do for ill and disabled people.
Shortly after, Jerry asked me how my father was doing and I had to tell him that he had just died. He was surprised and apologized and soon offered me the weekend job of cleaning his shop. I guess he felt sorry for me because I went from being a normal kid to just about complete silence. Reading SF was my only real enjoyment for a couple years.
So Jerry died in his 40’s just like my dad. His barbershop is some type of office now. I eventually stopped smoking at age 32. One of the reasons being what I had seen with my father and Jerry the barber.
It’s hard to believe all the above happened 60 years ago. But I’m still collecting old magazines!
NOTE: To access earlier installments of Walker’s memoirs about his life as a pup collector, go first to this blog’s home page (link at the far upper left), then use the search box found somewhere down the right side. Use either “Walker Martin” or “Collecting Pulps” in quotes, and that should do it.
January 12th, 2015 at 6:26 am
Great piece, Walker. I suspect that a lot of collectors included girlie magazines in their collections. As a young teenager I once owned a large run of Playboy, issues I “inherited” from a neighborhood friend when his family moved away. (His parents didn’t know he owned them and he couldn’t very well pack them with his belongings.) I had them for years but eventually had to get rid of them in one of my own moves.
January 12th, 2015 at 7:56 am
I still have my old back issues of PLAYBOY, many of which I bought off the newsstands back in the 1950’s as a teenager. Back then it was considered pretty risqué but in addition to the photos of girls it also had first class fiction, articles, and artwork.
I consider NUGGET to be the best of the Playboy imitators and I also have most of the back issues. I especially like the jazz articles.
January 12th, 2015 at 9:50 am
Barber-shops…..
Back in the early-to-mid 1960s a buddy and I went prowling through the barbershops in the older part of town looking for old comic books. We dreamed of old ALL STAR and CAPTAIN AMERICAs but what we got was a CRIME-BUSTER, TOR and issue #1 (and only?) of E.C.’s IMPACT.
January 12th, 2015 at 9:59 am
Barbershops in the Trenton, NJ area don’t seem to bother with magazines at all. Decades ago, I remember stacks of magazines but just the other day I was waiting to have my hair cut and I noticed that there was no reading matter at all in the shop. Another shop I sometimes use has a copy of the local newspaper and that’s all. I think this shows once again that magazines are playing a smaller and smaller part in our lives.
Small electronic gadgets are playing a very large part…
January 12th, 2015 at 2:06 pm
The only way my mother could convince me to go to the barber shop was to remind me of the big stack of comic books they always had there. My allowance was 25 cents a week and after going to the movies on Saturday afternoons, there was money left for only one comic book a week, and it took a long time to pick out which one. But the barber had a good supply, which made the torment of getting my hair cut worth the the trouble. I am talking early 1950s. I no longer have the same problem, but the local shop does not have any comic books left out where I can see them.
The best days were when my brother needed a haircut and I didn’t, and I could take him. You have struck a chord with this article, Walker. It brought back a lot of memories. I still remember that barber shop vividly. I also remember being very nervous about bringing that first copy of PLAYBOY up to the counter to pay for it. I am now talking late 1950s.
January 12th, 2015 at 3:11 pm
I remember when my dad would give me money for a haircut. At the time, haircuts were 35 cents, 25 cents on certain days. I would collect the 35 cents, but get my hair cut on the days when the charge was 25 cents and spend the dime for a comic book. (The barber shop was in the basement of a drug store that had a comic book rack.) I don’t think this went on for too long, but I still remember the arrangement.
January 12th, 2015 at 3:46 pm
Mine had READER’S DIGEST and comic books, but only Charlton for some reason, though they introduced me to SARGE STEEL and artist Dick Giordano.
My uncle had a stack of men’s sweat mags and a few of the classier outlets like PLAYBOY, NUGGET, and ROGUE, and I do remember much of the fiction in those and the sweat mags where they usually ran a condensed novel by Frank Kane, Carter Brown, Talmage Powell, or other familiar names. Some of the best science fiction of the era was in those men’s magazines, Mathieson, Sheckley, Beaumont, Ellison …
But by the time I had reached the age to pay much attention television had replaced magazines, always on football or baseball, a snowy image that required the shoe shine guy to work on the antenna all the time with the electric shears messing up the reception.
The good news was the barbershop was only three doors down from the best drugstore for comics and paperbacks. It was only two blocks from my middle school and I used to skip lunch, catch a burger on the fly at the lunch counter, and then spend the rest of lunch looking at comics and paperbacks. Luckily no one in school ever noticed what I was buying save one teacher who borrowed THE GUNS OF NAVARONE from me.
January 12th, 2015 at 4:07 pm
In addition to learning about sex and risqué magazines, Jerry’s Barbershop also taught me another lesson. Once I came in just ahead of a lady and her son. I was next but then her husband came in also and said to me “Hey we’ll go next kid”.
I figured just the kid was getting a haircut so said nothing. They then all 3 proceeded to get haircuts. After they left Jerry said I should have spoke up and said “sorry, I was here first.”
I was learning a lot in that barbershop!
January 12th, 2015 at 4:57 pm
Steve in comment #5 reminded me of how many people viewed PLAYBOY in the 1950’s. They saw it as obscene. Ridiculous of course but that’s how they saw it. I also at age 14 was very nervous about buying it at the newsstands and I finally found one in Trenton that didn’t mind selling it to me.
Later on I was dating a girl and we went to her Catholic church. It was my first and last visit. The priest told the congregation to rise and take the pledge against PLAYBOY magazine. This meant to not read it. I believe I was the only one to not stand and that was the end of that romance.
January 12th, 2015 at 11:58 pm
By the time I hit PLAYBOY age in the mid sixties (and I was a bit premature even then) the magazine wasn’t considered quite the threat to the American way of purity it once was and the interviews and people like Jean Shepherd and Nabokov had mainstreamed it a bit.
By the time I hit college my mother was reading my PLAYBOY’s (of course in her day she had read her brother in law’s ESQUIRE’s too, so she may be a bad example) when I brought them home. Of course she actually really read the articles (yes, there were articles — at least I think there were articles …). Later when HUSTLER and PENTHOUSE came around PLAYBOY could practically be left on the coffee table when the minister came to visit.
Yesterday’s smut somehow seems tamer usually.
January 13th, 2015 at 12:52 am
For awhile, I thought PLAYBOY was publishing some of the best fiction and articles in America. This was in the late 1950’s, 1960’s, 1970’s. Then about 30 years ago I stopped reading it. That’s around 1985, so I’m not aware of what the magazine is like today but I’ve heard it’s just a shadow of what it used to be.
January 13th, 2015 at 5:56 pm
Walker
I haven’t read regularly since ’95 when I let my subscription run out. Now it still does a bit of fiction, but seldom the kind of names it used to attract and it feels at times they are just putting out a magazine called PLAYBOY, and not the PLAYBOY of my time.
March 1st, 2015 at 2:59 pm
My dad owned a barber shop for a few years mid 1950’s. He took me sometimes on Saturdays when I was a young girl. He had two stacks of reading material. Comic books for kids and and nude women magazines for men. That’s how I learned how to read. I swept the floor and earned 2 quarters, became a hairdresser after high school.
March 1st, 2015 at 10:58 pm
Hi Vicky—Thanks for your response. I bet many barbers had the same system as your dad and Jerry the barber. For many years my wife was also a hairdresser after high school.