AUBURN — When Paul Jalbert started cutting hair 60 years ago, he was a junior in high school following his dad into the trade. Flattops cost 50 cents, shaves were $1 and you didn’t think of doing anything fancy.

“They’d say, ‘Paul, if you use that hair dryer on me I’m not coming back,'” Jalbert said. “Men have evolved over the years. They even have their eyebrows waxed. They wax their body, too — you can use your imagination on that.”

He first picked up scissors in 1955, apprenticing under his father at his father’s place, Fred’s Barbershop, on Broad Street. His brother and uncle were barbers. The shop had four chairs and the little place could hop.

“People would wait inside of their cars (to get a haircut),” Jalbert, 76, said. “I’d go get them — we didn’t have room for them.”

He made good money early and Jalbert said he figured he’d use his barbering skills to pay his way through college. The hitch: He didn’t know what he wanted to go to college for, and he liked barbering.

Jalbert has been solid on the career choice for all but three days of his life. That’s how long he quit once, telling his father he’d rather hang out with friends.

“I thought about it, I said to hell with it and I never looked back again,” Jalbert said. “And I’ve enjoyed working every single day. Even today I enjoy my work.”

When he bought his father’s shop in 1961, he left the name Fred’s Barbershop to honor him. Jalbert sold the shop nine years ago and moved down Broad Street to All About U Salon to cut there. The building is the home to the former Mr. Richard’s Barber School, the last barber school in Maine. Without the school, it was getting too hard to find employees, Jalbert said.

He’s cut mostly men’s and boys’ hair through the decades and done very little women’s. No interest. Plus, he said, laughing, they’re too fussy.

Customers have been long and loyal. Some were rattled a few years back when Jalbert was out recovering from a quadruple bypass, telling All About U owner Dee Chapman, “‘Oh, I don’t know, no one’s cut my hair for 40 years other than Paul.'”

Jalbert initially approached Chapman to work three years and finish out his career. It’s been nine. He calls them nine excellent years, and there’s no quitting in sight. 

Jalbert, who also sings with the Just Us entertainers, works five days a week with a two-hour lunch. He’s decorated the area around his chair with a picture of his mother and father, Fred and Gertrude, clippers, shears and a hair dryer that he said is only used for blowing the clipped hair off men’s clothes.

“Don’t listen to him — he’s got more tales than Walt Disney,” joked Frank Corrao of Lewiston, sitting down for a trim Thursday. He’s been a customer for 30 years.

With a state license dating back to 1957, Jalbert is among the oldest barbers still practicing in the state. People occasionally ask Chapman when she thinks he’ll be ready to retire.  

“The day his eye doctor stops coming in (for a haircut), it’s the day you want to stop seeing him,” she said. “He’s just an icon in the community.”

Know someone everyone knows? Contact staff writer Kathryn Skelton at 689-2844 or kskelton@sunjournal.com