The story below is from our September/October 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
A glimpse into the Edwards family school, a downtown Roanoke institution since the 1960s, where tradition, community service and resilience are woven into every haircut.
Anthony Giorgetti
Dana “Gig” Edwards sits in Gig Edwards Studio in one of the old chairs from his father’s school.
When you imagine a barbershop, you likely picture two to three stools with a couple of guys talking and a couple more waiting their turn, a la Mayberry or the “Barber Shop” films.
Now imagine one with 36 chairs divided evenly down the middle with a little boy sweeping up the hair between them. And put it inside of downtown Roanoke’s 202 Social House.
Downtown was different in the ‘60s.
You couldn’t drive down Market Street on a Saturday because of all the farmers. And Kroger sat next door to Virginia Barber College, where future barbers Dana “Gig” Edwards and Jim Melvin Edwards, Jr. trained under the eye of their father, Jim Sr.
“You had to be 16 years of age to take the state board,” recalls Jim Jr. The boys began their official schooling at 14. “Old Hollins Barber Shop was my first job in high school. Instead of bagging groceries, I was actually barbering.”
And the little boy sweeping the floor? That was Gig. Before he could cut and shave, Gig earned a few cents for every sweep of the room, and with 36 chairs in constant action, there was plenty of sweeping to do.
Anthony Giorgetti
The school trained many barbers who brought their craft to Roanoke and the surrounding areas, many funded by the GI Bill. However, not everything was smooth. Gig remembers a cross burning on their lawn, a hateful reaction from the KKK to his dad training a Black veteran.
Jim served his community with quiet commitment. He once sent his assistant next door to Sam’s on the Market to buy shoes for several kids whose father spent all his cash on their haircuts. He’d let homeless men exchange a chore in the shop for a shave or cut. “They were some of the cleanest windows on the market,” Gig says, laughing.
Even short of washing windows, the school was an affordable option for families. Cuts were $0.50, $0.75 or $1 depending on the student’s experience level.
When summer rolled around, they’d get truckloads of kids coming in for their summer crew cuts. Gig’s first day moving from broom to shears was the first Saturday of summer. “My first day, I cut 19 haircuts!”
Saturday mornings were also popular for the hungover crowd, though Jim Sr. had a strict rule about no drunks in the chair. A relatively short man, he still once hoisted up a patron by his belt and shirt and threw him outside after he fell asleep in the chair, dropping and shattering his booze bottle.
It wasn’t meanness — a startled man could quickly become a cut man! And in that instance, Jim felt bad and invited the man back a little later to finish his shave.
Jim Sr. died in 1970. His wife took over with Jim Jr. and one of the shop’s teachers.
Then in his late teens to early twenties, Jim Jr. had a new family and his own shop to run on top of trying to keep the school afloat. Many of the students were veterans in their fifties, and he quickly saw learning from him “wasn’t going to work.”
After a few years, they sold the school. It later relocated to Williamson Road and eventually became Roanoke Hair Academy which remained open until the late 1990s.
Today, Jim Jr. is retired in Myrtle Beach, but Gig still works full-time cutting and styling at Gig Edwards Studio on Peters Creek Road, “a salon in the Edwards’ family tradition since 1960.”
Though, as Jim Jr. says, “in a roundabout way… we’re third-generation.” Jim Sr. got into the business with encouragement from his father-in-law, a barber in Norton, but that’s a whole other story.
The story above is from our September/October 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!