Memories: Bad Haircuts and The King's Barber!

I need a haircut!

These days I'm blessed with the fact that Mrs. Denmarkguy cuts my hair, and she is a very good hair cutter. I haven't actually had my hair cut at a hairdresser or a barber shop for at least 10 years. I hate to even think about how much that costs, these days!

When I was a kid, my dad cut my hair. It was your basic "knuckle cut" in more or less a bowl shape, a "style" that left no doubt that you just had a haircut when you arrived at school the following day!

Whether it's the awful haircut or something else I don't know, but little boys hating to get a haircut seems so much like a rite of passage. I would hide and dodge the issue as much as possible until my dad finally wouldn't put up with it anymore, after declaring that I looked like a shaggy dog.

Although this all took place in the late 1960s when longer hair on boys was definitely a thing, there was no such thing at our household. Any hair on a man that was longer than maybe an inch was considered offensive!

I was probably 9 or 10 when I finally graduated to getting adult haircuts from a real barber.

As luck would have it, the main barber in our local suburb north of Copenhagen also happened to be the barber who cut the King of Denmark's hair. He was by no means the only barber in town, but I think it really appealed to my mother's sense of snobbishness to send me for my haircut to the man who cut the king's hair.

Mr. Tambo was actually anything but snobbish and pretentious, and actually cut the hair of a lot of local boys at my school. One of the cool things about going to him for a haircut was the fact that he had a large basket of sports cards that we could pick a few from if we had been — in his opinion — "good boys" while getting our hair cut.

Clearly, he was a smart man who understood the value of using a bit of well-placed bribery to control unruly little boys!

He was probably a pretty good haircutter. At least when I looked at some old school photos a while back, I went from looking pretty ridiculous in second and third grade to a lot more presentable in 5th and 6th grade and beyond.

I continued to have my hair cut by the King's Barber until my mother and I moved to Spain when I was 12... after which the task fell to one Don Francisco Hernandez who confessed (after a while) that I was the first kid with blond hair he'd ever had as a customer.

I guess I dredged up this old memory today, when I looked in the mirror this morning and realized that I was approaching the "Shaggy Dog" look that annoyed my father so much.

Thanks for stopping by and have a great remainder of your week!

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Created at 2026.02.04 00:07 PST
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