Connie Wright finishes the final touches on Ray Decoto’s hair at Connie Barbershop in Yakima on July 2. Decoto has been getting his hair cut by Connie for almost 42 years. (MASON TRINCA/Yakima Herald-Republic)
Phone: 509-577-7690
It’s tempting to say she’s a cut above.
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A shear delight. A hair raiser, even.
It’s tempting.
But Connie Wright is so much more. For one, the 62-year-old has long been the dean of women barbers in the Yakima Valley, carving a path as the only female barber here when she began cutting hair in 1972. (She’s heard there was a woman barber in town in the 1950s, but, regardless, Connie had to forge her way in a man’s world, sometimes a rather hostile one.)
She’s run Connie’s Barbershop since 1985, first at 11th Avenue and Tieton Drive, then, beginning in 2005, at her present location a few blocks west at 1511 Tieton Drive.
It’s a small, homey place: checkered linoleum on the floor and two strops, for sharpening straight razors, hanging on the wall. There’s nothing new-fangled, unless you count the microwave, where customers can heat a cup of coffee. Otherwise, one black upholstered chair, with an attached, yet idle, ash tray, sits in the middle, flanked by a wall calendar with a photo of a 1965 Chevy Impala. A bookshelf overflows with paperbacks to borrow.
But don’t look for a hair dryer, blow dryer, hot comb or even a sink. Walk in, and be transported to an earlier era.
There’s a sense of comfort here, like old leather gloves. A sign on the wall, “Peace to All Who Enter Here,” sums up the aura.
Three generations of customers make up her loyal corps; more than a dozen men have come for haircuts since her earliest days as a barber 42 years ago. “Some of them tell me that we’re just turning gray together,” she laughs. Connie laughs a lot, creating an easy-going ambiance that keeps many folks coming back — people in their 80s and children not yet in school.
“You can talk to her about anything,” says Jack Morris. “Like fish (there’s an aquarium in the shop) and hot peppers.” Connie is widely known for her homemade jalapeno jelly.
She’s gone through the duck tail phase in haircuts to the crew cut, flat top, Mohawk, tiny braid, bowl cut, feather cut, Beatle bangs, dangling sideburns, super short and anything goes. The most enduring hair style has been the crew cut.
When she first started out, the Princeton cut was all the rage, short on the top with long sides to comb back. “It was a pain in the butt,” she recalls.
Back in the 1970s, Connie became the arbiter between teenagers who favored long, stringy hair and their horrified parents. She finds it amusing that those teens are now parents, and their children want very short hair.
A haircut costs $12; seniors pay $11. Women, about 10 percent of her clients, pay the same. She long ago stopped offering shaves, shampoos, sets, permanents and dyeing, what Connie terms the “foo-foo stuff.” For both men and women, it’s pretty much just the cut.
Connie didn’t set out to do barbering. After high school, she took a job sewing waistbands into blue jeans, which she immediately hated. “It felt like a concentration camp.” Then her sister spotted a newspaper ad for the Moler Barber School in Yakima and dared Connie to enroll. “I had no idea what I was getting into. I just showed up. I’d never even been in a barber shop before.”
On her first day, an instructor handed Connie, the only female student, a pair of scissors and told her to give a hair cut to a man sitting in one of the barber chairs. Apparently, she had a knack for it because the man followed her to her first job 10 months later and remained her customer for years.
After working as an apprentice for 18 months, mastering face and scalp massage, shaves with a straight edged razor, beard trims, shampoos and cuts, she became a licensed master barber. She was thrilled to land her first job in 1972 at the Broadmead Barbershop. The owner, Benny Schneider, was kind to her, but two co-workers eyed her with nothing but suspicion. Glaring, one pulled her aside one day and said, “I wouldn’t look good in a nurse’s dress, just like you don’t look good at a barber shop.”
Connie was undeterred.
“They didn’t want me there, but I was just stupid, I suppose, and stayed.”
She quickly learned the rules: during breaks, she could read men’s magazines, smoke or chew tobacco, “but I absolutely could not crochet.” She chuckles. “Now I have a man (customer) who brings in his knitting.”
It took two years before her co-workers tolerated the female interloper. “I knew I was accepted when they showed me the surgery scars on their backs. That was kind of my moment — I was OK.”
But one customer, a county sheriff, never came around. Connie remembers him sitting and waiting for an hour for another barber to get free, never acknowledging her question, “Would you like a haircut?” Even though he frequented the shop for years, he never let her cut his hair, nor did he ever make eye contact with her.
Other men, however, became instant fans — and still are.
As Morris, who is retired, said, “It’s a good shop, down to earth and personal. In a salon, you wash your hair, then you prance over to the other side, then you prance somewhere else. I’m not there for prancing. I just want a cut and get the hell out.”
Not only does Connie refrain from prancing, she accommodates special requests. Because some tribal customers believe their hair shouldn’t touch the floor, she collects the trimmings in a cloth so they can take them home.
For several years, Connie gave weekly haircuts to inmates in the county jail. Most of the men and women were polite, but security wasn’t what it is now and occasionally an inmate would be intimidating enough to give her pause. What would happen if she inadvertently took out a divot, she’d wonder. Would she live to regret it? She never slipped up, however.
Whether in jail or the shop, her customers feel comfortable telling her about themselves and their marriages, divorces and children. “A lot of people, I don’t know their names, but I know their whole family history.”
She also remembers people by their hairstyle preferences and what they don’t want. Nic Loyd, 29, a regular for about eight years, always gets the same short cut.
“What can I say? I’m a creature of habit,” he says.
A widow with two grown daughters (her husband, Wilbur Wright, was a distant cousin of the famous flyers), Connie has been cutting hair for all eight of her grandchildren since they were little. Setting the record for youngest customer, however, was a 5-month-old whose mother had to hold him in the chair because he couldn’t sit up yet.
Tony Luna, 38, has been coming for haircuts every six weeks since he was 6. Connie jokes with him that at least he doesn’t cry anymore in the chair.
Although business is steady, it wasn’t always so. Just about the time she moved into her present shop nine years ago, the economy started to falter, and people came in less frequently.
“Business was lean; it was scary,” she recalls. Finances got so tight that she lost both her house and car. She had to move into her mother’s home and borrow a nephew’s car. Fortunately, things are better now.
Soon, however, the longtime barber will be hanging up the razor and trimmer. Connie’s had health issues — she’s been diagnosed with diabetes and has impaired circulation in one leg.
Aiming to close her shop in late September, Connie may continue to do some haircuts from home. And she knows she’s going to miss the daily interaction with folks.
“I just may have to stop in and hang out at some barber shop and get my people fix.”
• Jane Gargas can be reached at 509-577-7690 or jgargas@yakimaherald.com.
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