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"How's your morning been?"
"Oh, started slow, then tapered off."
With this greeting, Larry Hall suppresses a wry smile to one of his regular customers, adjusts the height of the large, traditional barber's chair, leaving it pointed toward the four wood-framed windows and allowing his customer a view of the town square.
Larry's Barber Shop--come for a haircut or come for a glimpse of the cultural fabric of small-town, midwestern America. From Larry's shop, which continues a barbering tradition of 60 years, you can look out from the same perspective as those who first built the Fairfield town square. Each customer is like another sentinel over the passing parade of changes in the square, changes in building facades, stores, transportation, shopping habits, and social life, alongside the colors of the yearly cycle of seasons.
The retailing tradition on the square stretches back to 1839 with the first log building store. It was around the same spot as Larry's Barber Shop is now that William Hueston built the first structure in the town in April 1839, a 10' x 12' log building which housed the first store. Another long-established location is Gimbel's Jewelry, which is Fairfield's oldest continuous retail store, and while it was not called Gimbel's when it first opened 130 years ago, it has always sold jewelry.
In addition, according to Mark Brownrigg, who took over Brown's Shoe Fit in 1990, his store has been selling shoes since 1863 under several ownerships. Also, the location of Kurka Jewelers has sold jewelry since 1882, with Richard Kurka first starting there in 1954 before taking it over in 1967. And on the west side of the square, Gaumer Bros. Drugstore, started in 1914, held the record for a long time as the oldest business firm in Fairfield carrying the same name and partners. While ownership changed, it remained a drugstore until recently, when the owners closed it down to move it to Drugtown, with a drive-up location.
And that says a lot about the catalyst for change. The car, along with television and the faster pace of life, changed shopping, eating habits, and life-style. "We are a very mobile society," says Terry Lowenberg, a loan officer with Central Valley Bank, who has lived in Jefferson County for 58 years. "You had more commerce because you did not have the automobile. You didn't have people driving to Des Moines, Ottumwa, or Iowa City or going away for the night. . . . For our activities, our purchases, we go to Des Moines or somewhere." Robert Rasmussen, Fairfield's Mayor of 25 years, agrees. "The retail side of the square was a much more viable, different type of situation in the early days when we had far more small business and general stores. It has changed. Not for the positive as far as I'm concerned. . . . People would prefer to do their shopping in the malls out of town. There isn't much loyalty to buy local."
In fact "buying local" was the whole point back in the old days before the automobile and blacktop roads. You had to buy local because there wasn't any other choice. The basis of the economy was farming, and the towns in county seats were designed to service the farmers, either as central locations for dispatching produce to market or for supplying provisions. According to Lee Gobble, whose family owned and operated Gobble's Clothiers on the square from 1899 to 1986, when the mode of travel was a horse and buggy you could ride into the town in your county seat and return home the same day. "County seats are about 25 miles apart, and somebody said once that they were done that way so that the farthest away from your town would be 11 to 12 miles. So you could do a round-trip and do business in town and get back in time to do your chores." Gobble, now 82, remembers when some of the stores were open until midnight on Saturday night and were staying open till 10:00 p.m. even in his day. "The farmers would come to town and visit on the street corners until it was time for the stores to close, and then they would start to trade," he jokes.
As the early population grew, so did the number of merchants and services on the square. According to Gobble, most of the farms could only support one or two families, so the children from larger families came in to town and started up as merchants, lawyers, or other service providers.
"All the business people were practically off of a farm," he says. "If there were three or four sons and the farm could only provide a living for one or two, then one would have to come to town. Like my grandfather's situation. The attorneys and doctors and everybody came from farms. Of course, there was an occasional somebody who moved here for some reason: came from small communities that hardly exist any more. That is how they came to be the merchant or worked in the bank or this or that."
By the turn of the century, the town square had changed to its present design from the original circular central park. The view from Larry's then would have revealed hitching posts for horses and buggies, wells at each corner of the square for watering the horses, and drinking fountains for watering the humans. The most prestigious place to live was close to the square, so that the lady of the house could walk to buy produce and groceries. If you couldn't walk, you had to hitch up the buggy, and that took time and the man of the house.
"With the generation before me, at the turn of the century, it was the thing to have your home as near to the square as possible so that the wife could walk to town and buy produce. She would put on her bonnet and take her basket and stroll uptown and buy fresh produce, because there wasn't any refrigeration," Gobble says. The lady of the house walked on brick-paved roads to the dry goods merchant, Roths, on the northeast side of the square or bought from one of the bakers, or one of the grocers, such as the White T Super Valu Store, started by the White brothers in 1910. Maybe she would have had time to visit one of the tearooms on the square, or even enjoy the blue-plate special at Leggett's Hotel, one of the best restaurants in town, now demolished and replaced with the First National Bank at the southeast corner of the square. Some of the brick paving can still be seen around town and around the Broadway Building, but with the advent of the car, most has disappeared to make way for blacktop.
TV and the car changed everything. No one strolls around the square now to buy supplies or produce, as there is not one grocery store left on the square now. Also, there are no menswear stores, when there used to be three or four, with Gobble Clothiers alone housing four split levels. Gone also is Penney's, previously around the Somebody Care's site, and the three or four other junior department-like stores such as The Fair Store where Seifert's is now, and Thorne's, where there is a Christian bookstore now.
"If everybody sold their automobile and didn't own a TV, it would be just like it used to be. They are the two things that have changed our style of life. It's now catalogs and malls. Everybody thinks it's Wal-mart, but it is not all that," says Gobble. People no longer have a "Sunday best" outfit, and maybe it's the more secular pursuits in life causing more casual dress codes. "One time we sold nine suits for one funeral. Now you might not even see one suit at a funeral. And I notice one insurance company was allowing its employees to come to work dressed casually, instead of suit and tie," he laments.
But, as they say, the more things change, the more they stay the same. There are few certainties in life but at least there is some predictability in cycles.
Larry Hall finishes off a flat-top by holding the electric clippers in his two steady hands and carefully evens up the symmetry of the style for another satisfied customer, probably in much the same way he finished of crewcuts in the 1950s when he first started working in the barber's shop. Maybe they call the cut a flat top or spike now, but it's pretty much the same as those crewcuts he styled around 40 years ago when he took on the role to continue the tradition of the view from the barber's room for future generations of Fairfield.
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