Melvin Coats: Barber, friend

Editor’s Note: The following story was first published in 2010 and is now updated on the occasion of barber Melvin Coats’ death. He and his barber friend Curtis Hunt of Linden had some 129 years experience barbering in Cass County.

It’s 11 a.m. on a Saturday morning at Melvin Coats’ barber shop in Queen City. The room’s eight chairs are filled with seven customers ages six to 86. No one peeking in seems to leave because of the wait.

Coats is a model of efficiency. He’s been doing this for 54 years. The electric clippers, scissors, combs and their human owner seem to move without wasted motion. It’s a slow dance, but in moments the haircut is done.

Coats smiles a lot but makes little small talk. His customers seem to do all the jabbering, mostly about horses. Coats knows horses about as well as he knows barbering.

One six-year-old customer is waiting for a flat-top cut, a Coats’ specialty.

“No one cuts flat-tops like Melvin,” says the dad. Now it’s 12 noon, and the chairs are still full. How is Melvin going to get lunch?

“Forget it,” he says. He doesn’t take lunches. He’s been here since six a.m. and will stay until 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays. On Saturdays he gives himself a break and quits at 4.

However, these hours are an improvement. Until three yeas ago, his hours were 5 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Coats keeps these hours because that’s what his barbering mentor Curtis “Cotton” Clements did in the little room in Gilley’s General Store in Queen City where Coats began to barber.

In fact, a lot of the Coats’ character and consistency come from Clements.

For example, when the barber Clements took the young Coats to be an apprentice, one had to serve an 18-month apprenticeship. Some customers still rode into town in horse and buggy.

They tied up at the store and had errands to do, all in that one day. Coats remembers clearly.

”They might wait even into the night to get their hair cut because they were only going to make one trip into town that week or maybe that two weeks. They were farmers and had work to do. Sometimes on a Saturday night, we didn’t finish the last one until 11:30 p.m.,” Coats said.

That habit has continued. Coats says he is a barber for the working person. So if the working person comes by at 6 a.m., the barber will be there.

Let’s say that Coats’ work schedule is 54 hours a week. Imagine he sleeps in on Sundays? No. Queen City’s Calvary Tabernacle Church starts Sunday School at 9:30 a.m. Coats is a deacon and arrives at 6 a.m., so that he and longtime friend, Pastor Billy Dupree, can share Bible reading and prayer.

Actually, Coats gets up daily at 3 a.m. for an hour of riding the mechanical horse in his living room, reading the Bible and listening to news.

On days when he does have some time, he rides “Co Co,” the 11-year-old mare he’s raised, or puts two horses into harness and rides his wagons. That’s either the covered wagon, the Amish wagon, the one-seat doctor’s buggy or the breaker buggy.

“Breaker” buggy?” The breaker buggy is so named because it’s for horses you are putting in wagon harness for the first time. Working them, is the expression.

“It’s also the wagon you don’t care about, so if the horse doesn’t like it, tears it up and breaks it apart, it’s ok.”

Riding gives Coats the peace of mind he needs. “There’s something about being on a horse. If you like it, you love it,” he said.

Another Coats’ story bears telling. It’s about how he became a professional barber and now what he thinks the future holds.

When he finished high school in 1956, Coats had no idea what he would become.

“Mr. Clements had mentioned to me about coming in to help him. But I didn’t think anything about it. Then, Mr. Clements told my dad, and the first thing I knew I had a bus ticket to Dallas and barbering school.”

Coats left in a Moore Bus Coach that ran from Atlanta to Pittsburg, and there boarded a Greyhound for Dallas.

“I’d never been out of Cass County,” he said. “ Fortunately, barber school was right across from the bus stop on Commerce Street in Dallas.”

He spent almost a year there and upon graduation had his tools of the trade. He came to work for Clements and had his first shop there in 1956. Later he had his own shop, at places all of which were in Queen City.

He’s almost always been a single chair barber shop. Employees just never seemed to work out. And that gives him perspective on the barber profession.

“We’re a dying breed, I think,” he says. “First, there’s not much of requirements to be a barber anymore. Anyone can start out.

“It used to be that barbers could only cut for men and beauticians only for women. That went away with the ending of the state barber board and beauty board as well around 1970.

“Pretty soon, I think most everyone will be going to beauticians. I know I don’t like to cut long hair. I’ll do it, but I don’t really like to.”

For himself, Coats says he intends to continue “as long as I feel good. I enjoy people.”

Three years ago, Coats had to have by-pass surgery. Standing for 54 years and raising one’s arms high to make perfect cuts and trims is not easy.

Of course, easy isn’t in the vocabulary for the boy from Blaylock who used break broncs by first seeking a freshly plowed field on which to land while trying to find out which was better, horse or rider.

“Now there’s not so much plowed land to make for a softer landing when the horse throws you. And that ground comes up at you faster anyway,” Coats said. “So today, I just choose the more gentle horses.”

The young boys coming to his barber shop are like those horses. If they are gentle, the barber gives them something for their performance. It’s always a piece of Double Bubble chewing gum.