Last cut for neighborhood barber after 70 years
Joseph Harley came from North Philly, around Erie Avenue. Bobby Hopson drove up I-95 from Delaware. And Joseph Butler walked from around the corner — all to get a last cut and say goodbye to James A. Rice, who is closing the West Philadelphia barbershop his father started 70 years ago.
After moving from Germantown four years ago, Butler needed to find a place to get his twice-monthly haircut and he stumbled upon Rice’s Barbershop. “I came in and I really, really fell in love.”“Where next? I don’t want to go to a jitterbug shop,” Butler said, referring to barbershops with young barbers and clientele. “I want a more mature environment.”
Rice started cutting hair at 14, apprenticing under his father before he got his license at 18. It was less a personal choice than a parental requirement, Rice recalled. “It wasn’t a question of [me being able to say] no. Let’s just say I was inspired.” “If you provide the service then the money will come. And if you are consistent with that, the business will grow. You won’t get rich, but you’ll grow.”
“I was the first woman that James cut,” said Jule Walker, who met Rice in the early ‘60s when they attended Overbrook. Walker remembers accompanying her grandfather to the barbershop when she was a girl and overhearing the sports conversations that somehow resulted in her becoming a lifelong Dallas Cowboys fan to the consternation of a few of the barbers.
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