Go down and let Ron clean you up

 


Go down and let Ron clean you up


    This is another BCism and it came to mean almost any personal grooming situation that arose in our lives after the 1970's. The full quote was " Glen you've had a nice vacation but now I want you to go down and let Ron clean you up." This was all a part of the long hair war that raged after I left my job as salesman at Van Waters and Rogers Scientific Equipment company in the City of Commerce. I refused to cut my hair much to the chagrin of a father who valued men's grooming highly. BC would only allow my brother and I to have our hair cut at the expert barbers of "Howard James Barbershop" in Long Beach. He turned his nose up at Red's barbershop on Tweedy or any of the common tonsorial establishments in the Southeast. When you visited Howard James and then later Ron's there was big band music on the radio and the smell of aftershave in the air. They cut hair the old fashioned men's way with hot towels, straight razors on the neck hair and scissor cutting only. The only women seen in the establishment were manicurists and the talk was man talk all the way. So, in this instance I had grown shoulder length hair while working at UCLA where such hippy stuff was tolerated and it was making the old man perturbed. He really did not want to have me visit but he still communicated his domineering presence with notes and phone calls. One of the calls contained the key sentence which pleaded with me to get cleaned up by Ron who was my regular barber back to childhood. There was a similar demand made of my brother when he got married asking him to "go down and let Ron comb you out" which turned out to be disastrous. Eventually, I did get cleaned up but it was by a gay Chilean amateur named Raul and I preserved the pony tail and gave it to my Mom for Mother's Day in 1975.



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