The result is that although they’ll be looking for a new barber when he retires on New Year’s Eve, they will still have Linson as their friend – a friend one former customer so valued that she handed him an envelope containing $20,000 so he wouldn’t succumb to the tsunami of debt incurred during his late wife’s extended battle with pancreatic cancer.
The back story to both Linson’s career and “the biggest tip I ever got” goes back to Oct. 7, 1929, when his father, George Linson, passed the test of merit administered by the Twin City Barber College.
The elder Linson had gone to Minneapolis to learn his trade at a time before Ohio licensed barbers.
Barbering “was a profession he fit into,” Linson said.
It also was one George Linson took seriously enough that he always wore a starched white shirt and tie while working long hours.
In a string of shops, George Linson managed to pick up tricks of the trade and gain the confidence and experience he needed to set up his own place at Belmont and Columbus Avenues.
He was operating there in 1955 when Gene, a 17-year-old fresh out of high school, finished the Ohio State School of Barber Styling in Columbus and came on as an apprentice.
The younger clientele Gene brought in grew large enough that elder Linson fashioned another shop on Belmont just south of Hillside Avenue in 1957.
A picture taken that year in front of the shop shows a youngish Gene Linson on the right of a lineup of the shop’s usual suspects and gives a flavor of the place from those days.
The smiles all around come from the prank State Farm Agent Bob Kennedy engineered on George Linson after Kennedy landed a 25-pound trophy fish in Canada.
With Linson’s father out of the shop, Kennedy and the gang put that fish in place of the 19-pounder George Linson had proudly displayed, then waited so they could get a look at Linson’s face when he saw the larger fish – and so Kennedy could point out how shrimplike the barber’ fish was in comparison.
Gene Linson associates those days with the lost art of the barber’s straight razor, which, “to me is the sharpest instrument in the world.” As much as clipping tools have improved, he said, they still don’t match a sharp outline with a razor.
Posters on the shop wall from the late ‘50s and early ‘60s show the haircuts of the time as well: The Butch Cut or Astronaut, the Crew Cut, the JFK and the Ivy League, which Linson associates with actor Steve McQueen, whose hair was the perfect texture for that style.
Linson recalled how to pull off a Flat Top with Ducks on the Side, which combined a trimmer top with flowing sides associated with the Duck Tail or DA.
The Metropolitan, a longer-hair style of the time, brings the late John Smarelli to Gene Linson’s to mind.
An accomplished violinist and distinguished looking man, “I think he could get up in the morning and shake his head and (his hair) would be perfect,” Linson said.
Smarelli and the distinguished-looking attorney John Harper were Linson’s own walking advertisements in those days.
A trip into the service in that time for duty during the Berlin Crisis after the infamous wall was erected there brought fears of a hot war that turned cold.
Of greater import at Linson’s Barber Shop was the British Invasion that brought the Beatles and Rolling Stones across the pond and revolutionized men’s hair enough to generate a Broadway musical called “Hair.”
In 1965, “hair styling was just coming in,” Linson recalled, “and I wanted to get into it. If you couldn’t do that and charge more money, you’d go out of business.”
In addition to sectioning hair to make cutting the locks more manageable, Linson said it required razor cutting so longer hair would fall together and blend more smoothly.
About that time, Linson married his first wife, Brenda Dillard, a teacher. Their marriage would last 43½ years and produce two children, son Steve, now an administrator with the Northeastern Local Schools, and daughter Kimberly Gilliland, now of Troy, Pa.
As Linson’s family grew, so did his friendships with customers, including Don Cochenour, who was 14 when he first became a customer of Linson’s father and is about to turn 67.
“We’ve been through a lot together,” said Cochenour. “We’ve laughed and cried and prayed together.”
Nor has that been unusual in Linson’s shop.
In the process of seeing customers through divorces, illnesses and family deaths, Linson has never ignored a prayer request and often responded to them immediately.
“If a guy asks me to pray for him, I want to do it now,” he said. “I don’t want to wait. I think it’s very important when a person has a heartfelt problem that now is the time.”
In the mid 1990s – about the time Linson’s father, George, retired and moved to Florida – prayers at the shop were regularly being spoken on behalf of Brenda Linson, who was beginning what would become a 14½ year marathon battle against pancreatic cancer.
Linson praised God for Brenda’s ability to endure years of treatment. He also praised his customers/friends for supporting the two of them with a generosity of spirit that manifested itself in financial generosity to counter what the cost of care did to the Linsons’ finances.
“I had people give me a lot more than a haircut was worth,” Linson said. “They bailed me out of some tough, tough times.”
Just as community benefactor Mary Petticrew, whose hair he styled, gave him that envelope with $20,000 in it, members of the Hillside Avenue Church of God, where he and Brenda attended church, raised $57,000 to help defray the Linsons’ share of her medical expenses.
Brenda Linson died in May of 2010.
The financial cost of her care delayed Linson’s retirement until age 79 but the help his friends in and out of the shop provided has him feeling deeply grateful.
“To me, to be solvent today is a miracle,” Linson said.
To have remarried and found happiness with Marilyn, whom he met via an online Christian dating site, and who has moved from Somerfield, Mass., has been an unexpected blessing on top.
“She has a gift for singing,” he said, and a past that matches with his own, having seen her first husband through an illness that lasted 14 years.
They now attend the Enon Church of God.
Linson has prepared for retirement by buying a previously owned fifth-wheel trailer and diesel pickup truck to haul it.
His plans include adding to the total of 70 fishing trips made by plane into the Canadian north woods with the friends who transitioned from staying in a cabin to a tent during Linson’s lean financial times.
He also has visits with eight grandchildren and one great-grandchild on his mind.
As his career ends, he looks back at it with a sense of pride: “I have never, ever had someone get out of my chair that I didn’t feel I’d given my best on.”
It’s a pride not lost on his customers like retired physician Jim Gianakopoulos, who wrote a note thanking Linson for 60 years of “excellent professional care.”
Gianakopoulos prefaced the remark by thanking him for as long a stretch of friendship, seconding what Cochenour did while seated next to Linson in the shop.
“I’ll miss him as a barber but will always cherish him as a friend.”
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