Next week, Mary Endo will be waking up early, putting on her makeup and getting dressed as usual, but she has no idea where she’ll go.
"It’ll be New Year, so I’ll be cooking a lot, but after that I’ll just take one day at a time."
After more than 60 years of working at her eponymous North School Street barbershop, Saturday will be the 91-year-old barber’s last day of tending to her customers, represented by many a stoic old gent, who appear forlorn as they file in for one last haircut and shave, all asking, "Where will I go now?"
"All us old guys crying already," said Stan Fukumoto, who had just finished getting one of his last haircuts from Mary two weeks ago but was hanging out to talk story afterward as he usually does.
If it sometimes seems as if consumer loyalty is in short supply, that hasn’t been the case with Endo.
"One Chinese guy, I cut his hair for 60 years, and he still comes here," she said.
The same is true with Guy Matsumoto, who said, "I just made 59 years old and have been going to her since intermediate school. My dad took me there when I was 14 or 15. At the time, we lived in the area, but even when I moved to Hawaii Kai, I still went to her. I think she’s like the last of the Mohicans.
"She’s a good conversationalist and she knows everybody. Every time I come in, she greets me by name, ‘Hello Matsumoto-san!’"
He said he’ll miss the pampering of her shoulder massages.
As a sales manager for Sandwich Isle Termite & Pest Control, he said, "I work so much and I’m always on the go, so to sit in her chair is relaxing. You can zone out, or it’s fun to talk politics or new recipes with her and her other customers."
For Fukumoto, who’s 75, Endo is easy to talk to because they share the similar values of the so-called "Greatest Generation" preceding the baby boomers.
"As we get older we get more simple. We go back to basics because we came from that generation that didn’t have anything," Endo said.
"There’s no generation gap," Fukumoto said. "I grew up with barbers, and she does what my old barber (who died) used to do. We can talk hanabata stories. She’s basically like our therapist, who we can talk to about anything. I already told her after she retires, we still going meet at Ala Moana for coffee."
Her clients always had the option of going to contemporary stylists, but Fukumoto said, "Young men want more stylist kine. We more simple, everyday people, and we no more that much hair, not like the young guys. They gotta be more stylish ’cause they gotta meet their wife. We over the hill already.
"I’m such a yogore (slovenly) guy that when I’m at home I don’t shave, I wear a big lauhala hat so I look like a yardman. When the church people come, they ask, ‘Is the man of the house at home?’ They don’t talk to me because they think I’m beyond help."
When he has tried to go to a younger stylist, he said, the quality of conversation is not there, and there’s more of an assembly-line mentality. You’re in, you pay your money, you’re out.
"With Mary, when no more customers, we talk about one and a half, two hours about life, family, money, important things," Fukumoto said. "I feel free to talk about all kind stuff, and I never have to tell her what kind of haircut I want. She just does it."
Endo had no plans to retire, but said her landlord wants to tear the building down and rebuild, so she was given a month’s notice to close up shop. She’ll spend New Year’s Eve cleaning up, although most of the items in her shop have been claimed, including her three barber’s chairs. Two are going to a man who wants them for his man cave, "one for me and one for my buddy," he had told her.
When she was told about the landlord’s plans, she said, "I looked at him and I was kind of sad. I want to come to work every day. I always felt like that. I going to miss all my good customers. I want to thank them for being my customers all these years."
Endo grew up on Maui at a time when there were few jobs for women. Few families could send their children to college to become teachers, and with both her parents working on Paia Plantation, she said, "I would have had to work on the plantation, and my mother said, ‘I don’t think the plantation is good for you. It’s better to learn a trade.’"
She was apprenticed to a barber trained in Japan and spent the next couple of years cooking and cleaning for his family, in addition to honing her skills with scissors and straight-edge razor. She ran away twice due to the difficulty of trying to please the barber and his family, but her parents brought her back. In spite of the difficulty of those early years, she says now, "I’m glad I became a barber. I always thank my father and mother for thinking about me."
At 22, with the start of World War II, she moved to Oahu because work on Maui dried up. She found a job in downtown Honolulu and, after toiling a few years for others, decided to strike out on her own in 1950 after hearing about a new building at Houghtailing and School streets. She rushed over and fell in love with the location, which at that time had little traffic. She became its first tenant, paying $69 a month for her space. Her rent now stands at $750.
"I didn’t have money, but I took a chance because when you’re working for someone else, you don’t get ahead," she said. At the time, she charged 65 cents for shaves, 50 cents for haircuts (75 cents for long hair). To make her rent and have enough to live on, she worked until 9 p.m. each day. "I never went out. I just worked and worked, just to make a living. If I had a nickel tip, that was something.
"You don’t get rich but you can eat. You get steady job," she said. "I think I’m very lucky that I have this job. For one thing, I get to meet people from all walks of life — teachers, lawyers, businessmen — and they all have different stories. I learn so much from them, like from bankers that gave me investment advice, things you don’t learn any place else. They can be smart, they can be slow, but they all have stories. People are very interesting.
"One time (Teamsters boss) Arthur Rutledge came in, and I said, ‘Hello, Arthur Rutledge,’ and he said, ‘How you know me?’ I said, ‘Oh Mr. Rutledge, you’re so famous.’ Then he told me he wanted to organize all the barbers, and I laughed at him. I told him we couldn’t afford to pay union dues. He laughed but he never did organize barbers."
"In those days we had a lot of work," Endo said. She attributes the rise of Elvis Presley in the early 1960s as a turning point in fashion and attitudes of a younger generation. "After Elvis Presley came we learned to do long hair, but boys started wanting to do fancy things and we don’t do that."
When she started, most of her clientele was students from Damien Memorial School and Kamehameha Schools; they now skew much older. Among the oldest is 92-year-old Ralph Tomei, a veteran of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, who started coming to her only two years ago, when his barber retired. "She was an old lady and she retired, so I had to look for another place. Mary’s friendly and always gives me a good haircut," Tomei said, while dreading the task of searching for yet another old-fashioned barber.
Because her customers are cost-conscious, Endo is helping her clients find other barbers who will treat them like the family they’ve become to her — and who are also willing to keep prices to about $13 a haircut, about $21 with a shampoo — as many clients are retirees on fixed incomes.
And she’s becoming more excited about having time to take dance and tai chi classes at the Makua Alii Senior Center.
"I’m a very simple lady. I keep myself busy so I can get out of the house. One thing I’m going to have to do is to associate with women now, after 60 years of working with men. I wonder, what do the ladies talk about?"
Mary’s Barber Shop is at 1224 N. School St. Saturday will be her last day of business. Call 841-5534.
