Wednesday customers, friends and South White Street business owners helped long-time barber Bobby Perry celebrate 51 years of cutting hair in Wake Forest as he prepares to sell his shop and retire at the end of this month.
Not that he wants to, but as he said, “My legs are giving out.” His faithful customers are feeling left adrift, not sure where they can go now. Certainly no one else these days can offer the same careful cuts tailored to each one with the careful gossip bits thrown in. One longtime customer said Perry never repeated a rumor until he had confirmed it with three independent reports. And he knew more about the Harrison, Ray and other local families than many family members.
“I didn’t make much money, but I made a lot of friends,” he said this week, still cutting a customer’s hair. A pretty good way to end up.
He has cut hair even longer than the 51 years in Wake Forest, for he began barbering in Bunn in 1959 – that is 57 years in the same profession.
Perry moved to Wake Forest in 1965 to work at Barney or B.J. Powell’s barber shop in a small space next to the entrance to the Forest Theater. Powell’s son, B.H., says that Powell and I.T. Nelson opened the Family Barber Shop in the 1940s. Before that, they worked for Moses Perry in his barber shop. Milton Catlett and Harold Stell also worked at the Family Barber Shop. About the time Bobby Perry moved to Wake Forest, Nelson died.
The Forest Theater was laid out in an L with spaces for shops in the open part of the L. There was the barber shop, P.D. Weston’s soda shop and Elsie Caudle’s fabric store in 1965. Earlier, the Wake Forest Post Office, which had always been in the postmaster’s house or rented spaces all over town, was in the southern-most space, but in 1940 the mail operations moved across Owen Avenue into the first post office building in town. It still stands but is now home to a chiropractor’s office.
Near disaster struck on July1, 1966, when the theater caught fire, a fire only extinguished after seven fire departments worked the hoses. Perry and Powell were still giving haircuts while smoke curled through the shop. They only evacuated because the firemen forced them to.
After a while, apparently at least some months, the barbershop relocated across the street in the Arrington building where Solid Sounds is now, Perry said. It was to remain there until 1979 when Caudle, who also relocated after the fire, moving north a block into the building that was originally Ben’s of Wake Forest men’s store. She retired, and Powell and Perry moved in, renting the building from Harvey Holding and later James Holding after Harvey died that year. Powell sold out to Perry at some point but continued to work there, B.H. remembers, until about 1986 when he went to a nursing home. He died in 1991.
Harvey Holding, owner of Holding Oil, built a Texaco station on that piece of land at the corner of South White and Jones probably in the late 1930s. After World War II, Ben Aycock and his new wife, Leila Holding Aycock, came back to town and Ben wanted to own a men’s clothing store. Harvey Holding tore down the gas station and built the existing barbershop because, as Perry said, “He was his brother-in-law, you know.”
Aycock maintained the men’s store after the college left in 1956 but closed it in 1961 to become the Wake Forest postmaster.
Perry said there was a garden center in the building and some time later Caudle moved her fabric store there. Perry and Powell moved in at the end of 1979 and Perry bought the building ten years later.
It will now become, if the new owners’ plans work out, a wine bar and yoga studio. See article in this issue.
One Response
Thank you for cutting hair all these years, Bobby Perry!!
And to Carol, thank you for sharing the history of the building and Bobby’s life there.
I would encourage your readers to seek out their next good haircut with Mario Napolitano at Creative Shears, just down the street from Bobby!!