Ryan Heckart | Photograph by Adam Williams
Editor’s Note: This is from the monthly column for We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream podcast, written by Adam Williams. The column is published in two newspapers local to Chaffee County, Colo.: the Chaffee County Times (Buena Vista) and The Mountain Mail (Salida).
‘We Are Chaffee’ Podcast with Ryan Heckart
Ryan Heckart. He’s the owner and barber of Green Street Barbershop in Buena Vista. Which actually is on Main Street. So what gives with the name, right?
In a recent episode of We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream podcast, Heckart and I talked about where “Green Street” comes from. Here’s his telling of it, as passed down by his grandmother:
“The Green Street name comes from my grandmother’s side. Her dad, in the late 1930s, early ’40s, as people were coming out of the Great Depression and just didn’t have money for everyday things, my grandfather started to notice, ‘Oh, kids need their hair cut. They can’t afford it.’
“You had all these kids running around ragged in the early ’40s with long hair. And so he just started cutting the kids’ hair on his porch. It grew into this thing where he started going into his basement to cut hair and he never charged a dime for it. It was on Green Street and everybody started calling it the Green Street Barbershop.
“Then during World War II, when the government started helping out with stipends for people to get back on their feet after the Great Depression, he just stopped and never really talked about it. It was just done. Even when my grandma told me the story when I first went to barber school, she told me the story and one of her kids had never even heard it. No one ever really talked about it. He just did this small thing for the community and then was done once people got back on their feet.
“As soon as I heard that story, I was like, ‘When I do open my barbershop someday, it’ll be called Green Street Barbershop, no matter the location.’”
Heckart and I also talked about some barbering history on the podcast. If you listen, you’ll immediately hear the passion for the subject of all things barbering in Heckart’s voice.
We talked about the impacts of the Beatles’ mop-tops on men’s hairstyles in the ’60s, the long hair of the ’70s, and of the fear surrounding the AIDS epidemic in the ’80s. Ultimately, barber shops faded out across the country, no pun intended. For a while.
But in more recent years, there’s been a resurgence of barber shops. It’s brought an updated aesthetic with it. To the barbers themselves, with their tattoos and personal flair. And to their bigger bag of tricks they use and broader range of hairstyles that walk out of their shops.
But Green Street Barbershop stays connected to the roots of the trade and to Buena Vista’s history, too. Heckart and I talked about the century-old barber chairs he takes such pride in and that he’s set up shop in Cockeyed Liz’s old brothel, in a building that’s even older. Among other things.
Listen to We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream community podcast, with new conversations publishing weekly at wearechaffeepod.com and on all podcast players (e.g. Spotify, Apple Podcasts). It also airs on KHEN 106.9 FM community radio in Salida at 2 p.m. on Tuesdays.
Adam Williams is host, producer and photographer for We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream podcast. Listen at wearechaffeepod.com. Follow @wearechaffeepod on Instagram.
