Get a cut, a trim or just a feel for the community at Hill's Barber Shop

Originally published Saturday, January 22, 2000

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

There's a Norwegian barber in Lake City who still does it the old-fashioned way: He trims around your ears and Viking horns with a razor.

You hardly find that any more; most barbers have stopped the razor trims that always have been the ultimate finishing-off mark of a real man's haircut. But then, that's the way Arv Hill has been cutting hair in the heart of Lake City for more than 40 years.

There are at least a half-dozen shops to get haircuts within walking distance of the main intersection of Lake City Way Northeast and Northeast 125th Street. But Hill's Barber Shop, with its old barber pole spinning, seemed the most comfortable on a recent drippy afternoon. Perhaps it was the hand-printed sign in the front window:

"LA OSS KLIPPE HARET 'DERES' "

"Well, it means: 'Let us clip hair -- Yours!' " said the wiry, brown-haired fellow, lifting the razor from his customer's ear as he fielded my inquiry from the front door. Arv looked at my gray hair and assumed I met the discount rate (62 and retired), and said: "For you, $11."

In the strange poker-chip accounting system of the small shop at 12520 Lake City Way N.E., that would mean a white poker chip on the stack next to the old cash register he bought more than 40 years ago at auction for $5. A red poker chip stacked next to the register stands for a full-price $12 haircut. And a green poker chip stands for a $5 beard trim.

I'm not sure why stacks of colored poker chips make for a viable accounting system when you've got a perfectly good working cash register, but when the other guy is holding the straight razor -- even if he is 83 years old -- you don't want to ask too many questions.

Besides, the second-chair barber backing up Arv at Hill's is Jim Rutherford, who's big enough to take any unwanted customer outside and plant him in the median strip alongside the infamous Lake City Way "Baked Potato" sculptures.

So we gently changed the subject to what might bring a 19-year-old North Dakota farm boy to the Puget Sound area in the mid-1930s. "Well, we had a buddy who worked at one of those fire (spotting) towers during the summers out here, and he kept telling us how beautiful it was out here. So when I was 19, my buddy and I came out here," said the man born Arvid Hill.

He didn't quite escape farm work, though. "I ended up working on a farm in Hillsboro, Ore. And it included milking all the ornery cows by hand. People here liked us guys from North Dakota because we could do any kind of farm work: horses, cows, machinery, crops . . . anything that required a strong back and weak mind."

It was when he was working as a farmhand on San Juan Island that he "met an old Norwegian in a friendly tavern and he wanted help building a boat to go fishing in Alaska. I didn't know anything about boat building, but I could work hard."

That was the start of an on-again, off-again Alaskan-fishing career for this transplanted Viking.

Years later, he would alternate fishing in season and barbering when he went on the beach. Arv recalls that "we got about 14 cents a pound for salmon, and a haircut cost about 75 cents then."

In the late 1930s, between fishing seasons, Arv found himself in Seattle and spending time in dance halls. "It was love at first sight!" he swears, about meeting Laura, who had come here from Colorado to be with a cousin. Laura recalls that the dance hall "was one of those very popular ones, where single girls could go and meet single guys . . . the girls stood on one side of the room and the guys stood on the other side, until the music started. They played polkas and schottische and dances like that."

Less than a year later, they were married and moved to Brier. And not long after that, World War II broke out and Arv enlisted in the Coast Guard. While he was gone, Laura joined the thousands of other women in the Boeing work force. "I also worked in the shipyards in Seattle," she said.

Arv came home from the war and went to Moeller Barber College on the GI Bill, but he also continued long-lining in Alaska. "A guy I'd fished with in Alaska asked me if I wanted to go halves on a 46-footer he was having built down on the west waterway. So I fished another five or six years, but always did barbering when I wasn't on the boat."

His first job was in a four-chair shop on First Avenue near Pike Street. "In one week -- because the other barbers were either drunk or didn't show up for work -- I was working the first chair," Arv recalled.

After cutting hair in a succession of other men's shops, Arv bought a small four-chair barbering business "around the corner on (Northeast) 125th (Street) about 42 years ago."

He hopscotched around the corner to his current location after almost 20 years and has been here ever since. "I'm cutting the hair of four generations in one family," he said.

"Once in a while, someone mentions retirement. But then they ask: 'Who would I get to cut my hair then?' " he said.

Besides, Arv cuts Jim's hair too. Arv's son, Jimmie, who trained as a barber before becoming a pilot and flight instructor, cuts his father's hair. And neither Laura nor Jim's wife, Sharon, will let her barber husband cut her hair.