After 70 years, barber puts up shears
SAN ANTONIO — Upon meeting a visitor, Ernie Pérez, the master barber of this former military town, cut straight to a joke.
“At 92, what doesn’t hurt, doesn’t work,” he quipped, rising to turn down the television audio.
Harry Truman was in the White House when Ernie picked up the scissors and comb.
But now, after seven decades of cutting hair, giving shaves and telling engaging stories, Ernie is hanging up his clippers to focus on Guadalupe River catfish.
“If it weren’t for my health and my age, I wouldn’t quit. I love barbering,” he said.
At the end of the month, his small concrete block shop near Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph will close.
And for Ernest Anthony, 88, a customer for 25 years, this is unwelcome news.
“It poses a serious problem for me. Occasionally, when Ernie was sick, I had to find someone else,” Anthony said. “Elsewhere, it’s a 10-minute haircut. And at a salon, it’s $20 and up.”
At Ernie’s, the scissors, shaving cream and straight razor are still the tools of the trade, and a haircut might take a half-hour if the stories are also good.
Not much but the prices have changed here since the cozy shop with four red chairs opened in 1969. The list of services still includes a shoe shine and “massage bonicilla.”
On the shelf below the mirror are combs soaking in blue disinfectant and oldtime tonics and elixirs, including Clubman Aftershave, bay rum and talc.
Anthony, a retired Air Force major, comes every two weeks for the $12 trim and other amenities.
“It’s a good social time. He tells a lot of fishing stories and war stories. He’s got them memorized and they are all good,” he said.
Like the time back in the 1950s, when a B-29 bomber taking off from adjacent Randolph Field struck a radio tower and was forced to land in a cornfield on the other side of Austin Highway.
True to form, Ernie retold the story this week, noting again, with still-fresh wonder, “the only boy who died jumped through a window before the airplane landed.”
The walls of the shop are adorned with goofy fishing kitsch, pictures of Ernie’s grandchildren, now all adults, and photos of fish pulled from the Guadalupe River and coastal bays.
“The biggest one I ever caught in the river was a 12and-a-half-pound yellow cat,” he said.
There are also lame jokes including one that reads, “Will the lady who left her 11 children at Texas Stadium please pick them up? They are beating the Cowboys 14-0.”
But soon the shop where Ernie has cut hair for 50 years will be absorbed by the thrift shop next door, and Ernie’s gold Cadillac DeVille will no longer appear out front.
Born in 1927 in Pandora, in Wilson County, Pérez grew up in Seguin, the son of a sometime barber.
He got his start after a stint in the Army Air Corps when he attended Louie’s Barbershop School in San Antonio in 1949.
After graduating, he opened a shop in Seguin, charging 65 cents for a haircut and 50 cents for a shave.
A few years later, he went to work in Universal City, cutting hair for servicemen at the airfield.
In 1969, two colonels who were his customers offered to set him up with his own shop on E. Aviation Boulevard, and he has been there ever since.
With his wife, Susie, who died in 2016, he raised four kids, putting one through college. Along the way, he also built up a loyal clientele.
“I was born and raised in Seguin where Ernie lived, and he’s taken care of five generations of my family,” said Dr. Anthony Mays, 89, who had a medical practice in Universal City.
“Having a family barber is like having a family doctor. You get attached to them,” Mays said.
Mays’ daughter Kimberly O’Reilly, 59, remembers being piled into the family station wagon with her three siblings to go to Ernie’s.
“All the locals went there to gossip, get their hair cut and catch up on the local news,” she said. “I remember his shop and the smells, and in the back was a man who did shoeshines. I remember Ernie putting a board over the armrests of the chair. My sister and I would get pixies, which were short haircuts.”
Soon, it will all be over but the storytelling.
On March 28, a retirement party will be held at the shop. His youngest son, Ruben, 68, printed up 150 invitations, and has also arranged for a taco truck. There may be live music.
“I’ve invited all the politicians I can think of in the area. I also invited Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama and his wife, George W. Bush and his wife, Senator Cornyn and Senator Cruz, who has already written a letter back,” Ruben Perez said.
He said his dad is gearing up for the big farewell blast.
“He’s on board. He’s really excited,” he said.
“I know he’ll miss the customers. But after 70 years, I think he realizes it’s time to hang it up,” he said.