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With Shear Luck

TRIBUNE PHOTO CANDACE C. MUNDY

Jimmy Jorge, left, Mercedes Alvarez, and Etsie Clayton, stylists at RJ's Barber Shop, 7744 W. Hillsborough Avenue, works on clients Joe Javino, left, Theo Meade and Emery Alford.

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By ELAINE MARKOWITZ

Tribune correspondent

Published: July 9, 2008

TOWN 'N COUNTRY - Richard Jorge's hands seem to work on instinct - an instinct born of cutting hair for more than 40 years.

The Tampa native, owner of RJ's Barber Shop in Town 'N Country, learned the tools of his trade early.

Jorge said his late father, Albert, told him to find a trade when he was still a teenager.

"How about a barber?" he had asked his father. The elder Jorge agreed.

"My mother had a beauty shop right next door to this shop," he said one recent morning. "Hair was kind of in the family."

Jorge first opened a one-chair shop on South MacDill Avenue in the mid-'60s.

"I paid $350 for it," he said.

After four years he purchased his current place, which had been a barber shop since 1954. His brother Jimmy joined him several years later, following a stint in the Navy. Now, six barbers, including two women, are busy at work clipping, combing and shaving.

The brothers prefer giving traditional haircuts and shaves, but all six barbers have kept pace with current styles as well. A daily stream of clients attests to the shop's success.

"I've been coming here six or seven years," said Bob Lentine. "Etsie gives a good haircut."

Etsie Clayton, the woman in charge of Lentine's locks, is a petite Okinawan native who cuts hair standing on a small platform. She has been working at this shop for a dozen years.

"This is the only thing I know," she said of barbering. "I've been doing it for 37 years."

Jorge said barbershop art is not what it used to be when the brothers were taught traditional barbering.

"We just learned to cut and shave," he said.

Their schooling, six months at the former Tampa Barber College in downtown Tampa, was followed by a year of apprenticeship with a master barber.

Jorge said those barber schools are a thing of the past.

"Anybody with a barber's license today is a dinosaur," he said. "Today you go to cosmetology school."

Cosmetology schools, he said, teach students about chemicals for the hair, which the brothers didn't learn, and restrict the use of razors, standard fare in a barber shop.

Graduates, he added, go right into the workplace and can work in beauty or barber shops. No apprenticeship is required.

Even with their cut-and-shave background, the barbers are tuned in to modern preferences.

"We've gone through stages with our customers," Richard Jorge said. "People wanted long hair for a while, and now many of them want fades and etchings."

The fade, he said, involves shaving the hair halfway up the head and then blending the shaved areas into the hair on top of the head.

Louis Guevara has been a patron at the shop for more than a decade. He relies on Jimmy Jorge to give him a modified fade.

"The two women do more of these than we do," Jorge said of the four male barbers.

Etching, another modern technique, involves outlining the front of the head.

"We take the natural hairline and cut into it to make a real pronounced line," he said.

The majority of customers still want a plain haircut, though, and Jorge seemed grateful for that preference.

"We could take courses on different styles," he said, "but at this point we are old dogs who don't want to learn new tricks."

They clip and shape mustaches and beards as well.

"A couple of people want handlebars," he said. "Kids like little skinny mustaches."

A few female clients venture in occasionally. Jorge said the women present their own challenges.

"They all come in with a picture of a movie star and want their hair cut like hers," he said.

Both brothers admitted that, at the end of the day, the barbershop is about more than a shaved pate or clipped beard.

"After a while the customers become like family," said Jimmy Jorge. "I don't think any other profession has this."

He added that he has cut the hair of three generations in one family.

Richard Jorge, temporarily sidelined by an eye ailment, agreed that congeniality is a big part of the job.

"Besides making money you make friends in here," said Jorge, 65. "I enjoy my work and can't see myself retiring."

RJ's BARBER SHOP

LOCATION: 7744 W. Hillsborough Ave.

HOURS: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday

PHONE: (813) 885-2929

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