Mike Bird, his barber's chair and the drum kit in his garage at home in Wairoa. Photo / Doug Laing
It has been said that barbers are known not so much for the skill and quality of their work as the friendly chat and assortment of life things that proliferate on the shelves and walls of their barbershops.
For Wairoa veteran Mike Bird, it’s now what’s in his garage.
That’s where he’s moved his business – chair, clippers, and all – after 61 years clipping the locks in a salon on Marine Parade.
His interest in Fords and rugby have been obvious in the barbershop for years.
But the chair – recovered several times, but basically the original – now also vies for pride of place with a drum kit, on which he may give a roll on request.
The kit is a relic of his time as a musician in the area, mainly with a band known as The Concords, among his various contributions on the local scene.
As it happens, another band was perhaps one of the biggest threats to Bird’s fledgling barbershop business.
It was an era of change when The Beatles,amid a flurry of their 1964 hits, made long hair (thus fewer haircuts) a fashion statement for growing young men and boys escaping parents’ demands for a short-back-and-sides, thank you very much.
But the humble mullet may have helped save the industry.
Despite its origins going back at least to ancient warriors of Greece and Rome, Bird reckons the mullet, or at least the New Zealand passion for it, must have started in Mahia, the community he married into after moving to New Zealand.
“It used to be called a shaggy dog,” Bird says. “That’s the first place I ever saw it.
“The Beatles?” he reflects. “That put a lot of barbers out of business. They weren’t prepared to compromise, but I enjoyed it too much. It’s given me a bloody good living.”
Haircut “likes” have been common, again highlighting the reluctance of mums and dads whose sons wanted something different.
“No. You are not having a Carlos Spencer,” he remembers one dad telling his son.
Bird would have wanted to, rugby being the passion throughout his life, despite having grown up with football in the barracks town of Aldershot, in Hampshire.
He played for the local clubs in Wairoa and for the Wairoa sub-union, of which he is a life member. A lock or “No 6″, he played until he was 42, and his son played for the Hawke’s Bay Magpies.
The candy-cane striped poles out front on the footpaths have certainly become fewer and fewer, but Bird, who was born in England in 1944 and started working in his mum’s barbershop in 1958, never had one.
He’d worked 18 months with Hastings St, Napier barber Arthur Duncan, boarding the Saturday “9.31″ railcar every Saturday back to Wairoa and returning on the Sunday “4pm” to Napier each week.
Despite there being four other barbers and tobacconists in Wairoa, Bird started his own business in the only empty shop on Wairoa’s Marine Parade in 1964 – “down by the Gaiety Theatre”.
Not having the traditional striped pole beckoning customers was not the only thing that set him apart. In 2010, he made a “conscience decision” to get rid of barbershop retail staples, such as cigarettes, tobacco and pipes. Now, at 81, he still regards it as the right decision.
“One day, I looked out on the street and a young woman was walking past, pushing a pram, with two kids, and she was puffing on a cigarette,” he says. “My conscience got to me – I didn’t want to be part of it.”
But he still wants to be part of the barbershop industry.
Doug Laing has been reporter for more 52 years, more than 40 of them in Hawke’s Bay, at the Central Hawke’s Bay Press, the Napier Daily Telegraph and Hawke’s Bay Today, since its establishment in 1999. He has covered most aspects of general news and sport.