No more “haircut and a shave” from Marion barber

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president, gasoline rationed and the world at war when Clarence Frett gave his first haircut aboard the USS Beaufort.

Earlier this month, Clarence hung up his hair clippers and straight-edge razor.

“The body just won't do it any more,” says Clarence, 88, with a grin.

This after he shoveled snow from the walk past his shop and sat down in his barber chair. This before he says he still bowls three times a week.

As the last of Clarence's 66 years of hair clippings are swept away, he's asked once again, “How many haircuts have you given?”

“I've had that question asked me hundreds of times,” he says. “I have no idea.”

Suffice to say Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy - 12 presidents in all - have sat in the Oval Office while Clarence has ridden his sidecar stool around his barber chair.

“I was going to retire when I was 65 or 66,” he says. “I think I tried it two weeks. That was no fun.”

Clarence continued with oldest daughter, Donna, by his side, and her sister, Renee, coming aboard and their sister-in-law, Kim, also at a chair.

The girls will continue the Frett hair-cutting legacy, but they don't give shaves. As far as Clarence knows, he's the last straight-edge-wielding barber in the metro area.

Clarence never intended it this way. Building doors and sashes in Clinton, he joined the Coast Guard on his 21st birthday, Jan. 24, 1943. His ship, sailing the North Atlantic with 150 men aboard, needed a barber.

“They asked for volunteers,” Clarence says. “They pointed at you. You were the barber.”

Having to buy his own equipment, he charged a quarter a haircut. (Today, it's $12.) As the ship's only barber, he waited 40 days or so to hit port to get his own haircut.

After discharge, Clarence finished barber college in Cedar Rapids. After an apprenticeship in Montezuma, he came to Marion in January 1949. By year's end he owned his own shop, below sidewalk level on Seventh Avenue at 11th Street. He called it Frett's Barber Service because that sounded fancier than barbershop.

In 1968, Clarence built his present 18-by-21-foot shop on 10th Street, attached to a house he's rented out. About that time the long-hair fashion reduced business, so he worked part time as a custodian for a decade.

“That was rough times,” he says. “I don't want to do that again.”

Obviously, he won't, although he's agreed to fill in from time to time. And that will only add to the haircuts he's given that are impossible to count.