The William Marvy Company of St. Paul: Keeping Barbershops Classic

By Curt Brown

The William Marvy Company's barber poles, encased swirls of red and blue above a rounded stainless-steel base, hang on street corners around the country. The company began creating the vibrant signposts in St. Paul three generations ago. Modern versions of the bloody rags used by surgeon-barbers in the Middle Ages, barber poles are well-known icons, but the Marvy family story is largely unknown. From his humble beginnings as the son of a Latvian "migr" carpenter through the growing pains of his namesake company, Marvy showed business acumen and innovation that culminated with his invention of a shatterproof barber pole, ensuring the company's continued success. From crew cuts and the Beatles up through today, barber poles have remained an easily recognized social constant.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Jan 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781625850997

Curt Brown

Curt and Natelle Brown, MA, MFT, are directors of marriage ministry at Wellshire Presbyterian Church in Denver, Colorado, and advisors to the Colorado Marriage Project. They are experienced mentors to engaged couples, marriage coaches to newlyweds, and developers of the Marriage Alive "Before You Say 'I Do'" seminar.

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journey.

INTRODUCTION

You went up a long lane through groves to find it. When you stepped out and walked through the door, your short article turned into a book.

—John McPhee, Oranges, 1966

I descend rickety wooden stairs—more like a haphazard cascade of weathered boards held together with a few rusty nails. There are no handrails.

The basement is dark and has a dirt floor. Brick pavers and limestone jut out from mud walls as they have since the 1880s.

So many brick chunks have loosened and fallen that there’s a pile in front of me as I step off the last plank of stairs. I gingerly tiptoe around them and illuminate the darkness with my cellphone’s greenish glow.

According to Jim Stroh, whose barbershop is bustling above in Tomah, Wisconsin, the ladder should be at the bottom of the stairs. It’s not.

The darkness eases as my eyes adjust. I see a bent, aluminum ladder at the basement’s far end. I inch ahead amid fallen rock, sure a rat will crawl up my pant leg any second. I grab the ladder, balancing it precariously as I make my way up the stairs and into the Saturday morning swirl of Stroh’s Barbershop.

A couple of old-timers wait, watching an outdoors hunting show on a TV mounted high on the wall beside stuffed deer heads. A father, his five-year-old son perched on his lap, chats as Jim cuts the kid’s bangs.

They all look at me quizzically as I weave through the shop, dodging mirrors and patrons before waltzing my way out the front door.

I plant the ladder next to the entrance of Stroh’s Barbershop on the corner of Superior Avenue and Monowa Street, in the heart of downtown Tomah—if not the heart of America. The surrounding storefronts include the Crow Bar, Teepee Supper Club, High Guns and Firearms, Egstad Insurance & Inspection, Marilyn’s School of Dance, Amish Country Corner, a variety store and a tattoo parlor.

I climb four steps up the ladder until I’m face-to-face with the two-pronged target of this quixotic journey. The doorway into Stroh’s Barbershop is framed by not one but two Marvy Model 55 barber poles. Like the other eighty-five thousand Marvy barber poles made since 1950, these two aluminum and stainless steel iconic symbols feature rounded and reflective bowls up top and on the bottom that serve as caps and bases for the tubular glass cylinders housing the swirling red, white and blue diagonally spinning stripes.

The Marvy barber pole is a nostalgic survivor, still made by hand in a nondescript brick factory in St. Paul, Minnesota—creations of one of those quirky family businesses that started in the middle of the last century and today finds itself in a club of endangered species like the Javan rhinoceros and the ivory-billed woodpecker.

The William Marvy Company is the last manufacturer of barber poles in the Americas—north, central and south. Japan, China and Europe continue to crank out a few poles. But Marvy remains the king. Odds are, if you catch a glimpse of a barber pole on Main Streets in small-town America or in the heart of its big cities, it’s a Marvy.

A half dozen companies from Detroit to San Francisco once made barber poles. Then the Beatles and the Vietnam War struck, hair grew long, barbershops shuttered and barber supply companies went belly-up—leaving only the William Marvy Company to extend the lifeline of a universal beacon that dates back to the Middle Ages, when barbers were surgeons. They pulled teeth, used leeches to suck diseased blood from patients and hung their bloody rags to dry in the wind, swirling red and white.

The late William Marvy, the storytelling, cigar-chomping entrepreneur whose creations still punctuate street corners across the globe, had a favorite yarn.

A northern Minnesota fisherman purchased a Marvy Model 55 barber pole to put at the end of his dock, a glowing guide to help him find his way home after a night of fishing. He returned the pole a week later, asking for a refund.

What happened? Marvy asked. Why the change of heart?

The man explained that he had a line of boats puttering up to his dock, their captains looking for haircuts.

Jim Stroh, at his barbershop in Tomah, Wisconsin, stands below one of his two Marvy poles—this one, No. 40,561, dates back to February 18, 1965, according to the red logbooks in the Marvy Company vault. Photo by Curt Brown.

There isn’t a more iconic symbol, Jim Stroh said between scissors snips in Tomah.

Jim is fifty, built like a bank vault, squat with hardly any hair atop his bullet-shaped head. He wore a teal barber’s smock made of a shiny, synthetic fabric over a black T-shirt.

I explained to him how I had been commissioned to write a book about the William Marvy Company. A South Carolina publisher, The History Press, had seen a business feature story I wrote as a reporter for the Minneapolis Star Tribune back in 1997. It was intrigued by this last survivor of commerce, the lone barber pole maker left.

Jim Stroh, though, was too busy this springtime Saturday morning to really care. But he let me wander down to his basement and retrieve the old ladder I came to stand on.

Jim danced inside the window, his electric razor cleaning the nape of a customer’s neck. I fished my reading glasses out of my pants’ pocket, delicately maintaining my balance on the twisted ladder leaning against the weathered storefront.

It would be the first of countless such ladder ascents and visits to barbershops from Pasadena to Boston. I’ve often wondered what passersby thought I was doing, up on a ladder or stray chair, examining the fine print of a barber pole.

I spat on my fingertips and rubbed the grime and soot off the steel plate bearing the serial number of this Marvy Model 55. The one on the right side of the door is No. 8,945. The one on the left is the younger No. 40,561.

A few days later at the William Marvy Company offices, 165 miles west in St. Paul, the third-generation scion of this odd niche business let me into the vault. Dan Marvy plucked one of the blood-red logbooks off a shelf. His grandfather Bill—or, more accurately, his secretaries over the years—started keeping track of each and every Marvy pole. They noted the date it was created and which dealer took it to sell and install at barbershops from the Midwest to the Middle East. The company recently shipped some to Dubai through its network of global distributors.

Checking the ledger books, we learned that the one gracing the left side of Jim Stroh’s door dates back to February 18, 1965—when someone employed by the Varna Barber Supply Company in Winona, Minnesota, filled his order. The older one on the right, No. 8,954, was built on the third day of 1956, at the height of the Eisenhower years—an era of abundance in America. The cold war with the Soviets was simmering, if that was even possible. Fathers took sons to get their hair cut, and a barber supply salesman from Kennedy’s Barber Supply in Grand Rapids, Michigan, bought No. 8,945 and sold it in the middle of Wisconsin.

That’s precisely how William Marvy spent the Great Depression: driving a panel truck around southwestern Minnesota in his twenties, selling clippers and hair tonic. Bill would spend weekdays on the road, returning on Friday night for Sabbath dinner at his in-laws’. If a barber wanted to add a new pole to his order, Bill, his dealer, would have to install the hundred-pound cast-iron and porcelain behemoth.

So when World War II ended in the 1940s and aluminum became available, Bill Marvy got an idea. He would make a modern, shiny barber pole—lighter and shatterproof to ease barbers’ concerns about vandalism. It would be electric. No more wind-up keys used to keep older barber poles spinning through their clock-like winding mechanisms.

In one of dozens of logbooks in the company vault, William Marvy noted his first pole, made on February 17, 1950; installed four days later in Grantsburg, Wisconsin; and repaired three months after that. Photo by John Doman.

Nearly eighty years and eighty-five thousand barber poles later, Marvy Model 55s and their larger and smaller cousins shine on main streets from Paris to, well, Tomah.

I collapse the ladder and return it to Jim Stroh’s basement. Back in the shop, where stuffed birds join more than a dozen taxidermy mounts, World War II uniforms hang from the walls. One came from Lester Harris, an older customer with no kids to whom to bequeath his old uniform. The other came from an attic of a fellow barber. No one knows who once wore it. Jim explains how he went to a