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Mr. Frank Mikell
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Frank Mikell's family moved to Pittsburgh from Charleston, South Carolina. They had come during the Great Depression, looking for, but not finding, better-paying jobs and an easier life. |
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At the age of fourteen, Mikell starting cutting his friends' hair in his basement for extra cash. He makes it clear that he had "no intention of cutting hair professionally. "None! NONE!" But as a 25 year old in 1955, with a young wife and two small children, Mikell lost his job at one of Pittsburgh's steel mils. Disgusted by his experiences in working for others at the mill, and badly in need of money, he thought for the first time of his earlier stints as a barber to his friends. |
| Without ever taking a class in cutting hair, shaving or massaging, he took the professional barber exam and got his license on the first try. With two hundred dollars he borrowed from his brother and father, he bought used furniture and mirrors and opened his own shop in McKeesport, a town right outside of Pittsburgh. When he first started, he most cut most hair in the popular "Low English" style, close on the head. This style, he said, looked a lot like the current "fade." |  |
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Since Mikell's beginning, men have streamed in and out of the shop all day long. Many, however, do not come in looking for a haircut. Instead, the men walk right through the sunny front room, past the mirror and sinks, and into the backroom. In the past, Mikell said, almost all African American barber shops in Pittsburgh had a backroom. In these rooms, men could buy liquor and play poker at all hours of the day or night.
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| Now in his 45th year of business, Frank Mikell has had notable financial success, and attributes his achievements to his ability to listen. "I don't say I'm smarter than the next man. If you're sitting here, even if I know you're wrong, you're right. You don't chase a customer, you entice a customer. It's a lying place. These old guys come in here telling me about what a great lover he is—I can tell chicken salad from chicken manure." Mikell has managed to maintain a thriving business in an otherwise poor part of the Pittsburgh area, and parks his Lincoln cars, trucks or sport utility vehicles, which he trades in to buy a new one every two years, outside his shop. Now on his fourteenth Lincoln, Mikell says that everytime he buys a new car he loses about six customers. "Jealous," he shakes his head. "They're jealous." |
Mr. Mikell's new Lincoln parked outside his barber shop |
| Frank Mikell does not seek out younger clients, because he thinks that "it's too hard to relate to them" Also, according to him, many younger African American men in McKeesport are addicted to drugs. | He loves his work as it is, and loves his role as a center of the community. "I've learned from ministers, lawyers, thieves and cutthroats. Sometimes you feel like you're a psychiatrist—you leave feeling pretty good about yourself." |
The Steel Mills of Pittsburgh
The door to the backroom in Mikell's Barber Shop
