My mother’s name was Rose and my uncle Morrie had a wife named Rose and my brother Paul is married to a lady named Rose and I had a girlfriend named Rosie. But what I want to talk about is my father’s sister named Rose and who we called Aunt Rose and was known by everybody else as “Rosie The Barber”.
Aunt Rose had 4 brothers including my dad and she was the only girl in the family so the boys taught her how to take care of herself and Aunt Rose was considered a tomboy. She wasn’t afraid of anything. You wouldn’t want to get in her face. She had strong arms from working on the farm she grew up on and she was a very hard working woman – but she always seemed to have a smile on her face and was always cracking jokes and laughing.
Aunt Rose lived in a town called Bremerton across the sound from Seattle. Her first husband was killed in a logging accident and her second husband was a very hard working man named Roy Christiansen who immigrated from Sweden but everybody knew Aunt Rose was the boss.
They owned a farm and a lumberyard. Attached to the lumberyard was a barbershop and my Aunt Rose was the barber. She cut everybody’s hair from miles around for more than 50 years. Aunt Rose was constantly written up in the local as well as distant newspapers and magazines showing pictures of her at the barber chair with her scissors and an apron on and cutting away at a customer’s hair. She had a laugh as loud and as boisterous as any laugh you ever heard and she could cuss like a sailor. Probably even better.
When I was a kid, Aunt Rose and Uncle Roy came visiting my dad and our family in LA. We all went swimming at the local public swimming pool. Rose climbed up to the high diving board, drove off and came slamming down into the water to make the loudest belly flop you ever heard. She came up without her bikini top on. She kept going under the water trying to find it but she was laughing so hard that she could hardly catch her breath so she couldn’t retrieve her bikini top. Finally they asked her to leave the swimming pool. She laughed all the way to the ladies dressing room and you could still hear her laughing from the pool.
In the summer of 1969 when I was a long haired, bearded hippie, (after getting back from Vietnam) I decided to take a drive from LA where I lived at the time to North Vancouver, Canada to visit a girl I met in Palm Springs during spring break from College. Since Aunt Rose’s farm, lumber yard and barbershop was on the way to Vancouver, I decided to stop by for a visit. But once I knocked on the door and Aunt Rose saw my big old beard and long, frizzy hair half down my back, she came running at me with her scissors in her hand, a smile on her face and was laughing like crazy so hard that I had to run and guard myself from her chopping away at my fuzzy head and face.
After a couple of days of that, I was on my way up to Vancouver to visit the girl I met in Palm Springs because Aunt Rose was determined to cut my hair off and I remember how she used to cut my hair when I was a kid – and the only haircut she seemed to know how – the old bowl on the head and chop it all off style.
Everybody loved Aunt Rose and were sorry when she passed away recently. All her old customers came to her funeral and said how much they loved her.
Aunt Rose was buried with her barber sheers and her apron on and I swear she still had that smile on her face and I could still hear her laughing and cracking jokes.
