Memories of many noted customers
prentice license and he enlisted in the U.S. Army the following year, he recalled.
By the time he was discharged from the military at 21, he’d become a New York State licensed “master barber” and in 1964, he secured a vacant barber shop on Brighton 13th St., several blocks from his current site. Back then, he paid $75-amonth rent, charged $1 for a haircut and 75 cents for a hot shave, he said.
He now charges $12 to $16 for a cut and $12 for a shave.
When he first began, it seemed like an inauspicious time to start a barbering business.
The Beatles’ mop-top hairdos were becoming quite the rage and were beginning to usurp the quintessential “flat top” crewcuts that were popular for men through much of the 1950s and early 1960s. This meant that younger men were waiting longer between haircuts. Worse, more young guys began sporting beards, making hot shaves less popular.
Skolnick persevered and wound up operating at a three neighborhood sites during his 55-year run, vacating only when a landlord hiked his rent to more than he wished to pay.
He’s hardly slowed down since, working 11 hours daily, from 7 a.m. through 6 p.m., five days a week, 50 weeks yearly, taking only two weeks vacation in August. It’s an arduous schedule for a far younger man, much less someone nearing 80.
Skolnick, a diehard Yankee fan, is married to Linda, a special education teacher and has two adult daughters, Lisa and Kimberly. In addition to planning to spend more time with his wife, his kids and his three granddaughters, ages 25, 20 and 12, he also plans to take formal art classes for the first time.
“It runs in the family,” he joked, speaking of his own self-taught artistic skills, noting how his nephew, Arnold Skolnick, created the iconic 1969 Woodstock poster that features a white dove perched upon the neck of an acoustic guitar. Brighton Beach barber Jack Skolnick had plenty of interesting and colorful customers since he began cutting hair professionally in 1964.
For several years, beginning in 1967, Skolnick regularly cut the hair of legendary songwriter and singer Neil Sedaka, a longtime Brighton Beach resident who was by then 28 and already a wellknown musical commodity, having recorded, “Oh! Carol,” which reached No. 9 on the U.S. charts, eight years earlier.
“He was a very, very nice guy, very pleasant to talk to,” recalled Skolnick, who added that his own wife and his daughters regularly sat on nearby Brighton Beach during the summer months with Sedaka’s wife, Leba Diamond, and the Sedakas’ young kids.
Although he never cut the hair of another neighborhood musical icon, Neil Diamond, who graduated from nearby Abraham Lincoln High School, as did Sedaka, and lived only a scissor’s throw from his soon-to-be-closed barbershop, Skolnick regularly gave haircuts to Diamond’s dad, Kieve Diamond, who ran a haberdashery on Brighton Beach Ave.
Skolnick used to snip the locks of Hollywood director Darren Aronofsky, who grew up in Manhattan Beach. “I gave him his first haircut,” Skolnick noted with a chuckle, adding that he still regularly cuts the hair of Aronofsky’s dad, Abe.
In the 1960s, Skolnick cut the hair of legendary defense attorney and “hanging judge” Samuel Leibowitz, who later sat on the Brooklyn Supreme Court as a judge. Leibowitz was one of the country’s most famous defense lawyers, known for his successful postconviction defense of the so-called Scottsboro Boys, an infamous case in which nine black boys from Alabama were wrongly convicted of raping two white women; he also successfully defended gangster Al Capone on at least one occasion..