Starting with his name, Sherwood Parker is a memorable guy. You could easily pick him out in a crowd by his hair, which he calls “regular”, but one woman who works alongside Parker described his hairstyle as more of a pompadour. Hair matters to Parker.
He’s been a barber for more than 50 years. His barbershop, Parker’s Hairstyling & Barber Shop, is celebrating 50 years of business this month. He opened the shop on Terry Parkway in Terrytown back in 1973. For some perspective, Richard Nixon was still in the White House then, the average price of gas was around forty cents per gallon, and Sherwood Parker was in year one of business. He definitely carved out his own career path.
“As a young man coming out of high school, I never went to college. I used to work for West Virginia Parchment Paper company on Annunciation Street in New Orleans. I got a $1.44 an hour. It was tough and I saw that I wasn’t going anywhere. So, my wife’s cousin approached me and said, ‘why don’t you go become a barber?’ So, I decided two weeks later to go become a barber. I was twenty-two,” Parker told me.
Parker enrolled at the old New Orleans Barber Beauty College near the French Quarter. There, he says he learned about the physical intricacies of faces, heads and everything else necessary to successfully cut hair. After finishing his training, Parker spent some time with a couple of barber shops and then opened his own in 1973. In 2023, he offers the same service he did 50 years ago: haircut, styling and straight razor face shaving (with hot towels I should add). As Parker and his barbershop mark their golden anniversary, I took the opportunity to talk to him about longevity and how he’s been able to maintain it when so many other things in life don’t seem to last. Our conversation touched on hair of course, but I was surprised that Parker had another career during all those years of hair cutting. It sometimes required him to leave the shop in the middle of haircuts to rescue people. Listen to the podcast here.
