Barbara Loftis retires shears and blow-dryer to take up a bucket-list activity in retirement

Barbara Loftis will celebrate her upcoming retirement Friday by doing the same thing she’s done regularly for the last 55 years, more or less. She’ll be cutting and curling, styling and blow-drying hair. 

Friends, relatives and clients are invited to stop by Michelle’s Shear Artistry Salon, on the east side of the Gainesville square, between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. Friday to wish Barbara well as she prepares to hang up her shears.

She grew up on the Willhoit-area farm owned by her parents, the late H. O. and Lena Nance, completing her first eight years of education in the one-room school at Barren Fork and then graduating from Gainesville High school in 1960.

For a short time after graduation, she worked as a switchboard operator for Southwestern Bell Telephone in Wichita, Kansas, while dating a hometown boy, Jim Loftis, who was working construction in Kansas City. They had met when Barbara was a first-grader at Barren Fork and he was an eighth-grader there. They married in December 1961, shortly before Jim enlisted in the Army National Guard, which sent the couple to Fort Knox, Kentucky. 

Moving back home

After they returned to Kansas City, Barbara enrolled in beauty school in 1963, beginning a career that would last more than half a century. Jim worked in construction. Barbara worked for a Kansas City salon chain until their first daughter, Chris, was born in 1966 – the same year they bought a farm back in Ozark County. They moved home in 1968, settling into a mobile home on their land.

By 1969, Barbara was one of several stylists working in the Franchester Salon owned by Fran Lyday. Through the years, she’s worked with most of Gainesville’s hairstylists in one shop or another, including owners Bill Hambelton, Gay Strong, Marketa Hambelton and Michelle Anderson. “And I liked them all,” she said Monday. Barbara has done the hair of Amy Hickman, Mona Forrest, Melanie Deweese and Cheyenne Nash making her a four-generation stylist. 

Each workday started at 8 a.m. or earlier and lasted until 5 p.m. or later. In the 60s, “big hair” was the style. “The higher you could get it, the better,” Barbara said. “We teased it and worked in hair pieces and wiglets and lots of hair spray.”

In those “shampoo and set” days, women’s hair was rolled on curlers; then the clients sat under hairdryers before the stylists went to work, brushing, combing and teasing. 

A shampoo and set cost $2.25 when Barbara started. Perms were $10, “but we would have specials for $5,” she said. “Sometimes my hands would get so sore from rolling all those perms when they were on special.”

That was about the time when her clientele began including men – and even some of the men wanted perms, she said. 

When their daughter Jennifer was born in 1976, Barbara took off a little time to spend with her baby and then relied on family members to help care for the girls while she and Jim worked. In 1978, Jim built the house she lives in still. “The trailer just got too small after Jennifer came,” she said.

Hairstyling went through some major changes as “shampoo and set” gave way to blow-drying and curling irons. Local salons that once had four to six hair dryers gradually transitioned to having only one or two.

“We might have gone to a beauty show or two, but mainly we just taught ourselves” how to use the blow-dryers and curling irons, Barbara said.

A single mom

In 1993, their daughter Chris, who had been teaching school at West County in Leadwood, about an hour south of St. Louis, asked if she could come back home for awhile. “She went right to work after college, and she lived too far away to come home as often as she wanted to. She just got burned out and wanted to come home. Jim fixed up an apartment for her in the basement,” Barbara said. 

In April 1995, about a month before Jennifer’s high school graduation, Barbara was working in the shop one day when Don Rackley, who owned the insurance agency a few doors away, came in and told her that Jim had died of a heart attack.

“He was working with his brother, laying block for a garage for some people,” she said, “and he had a heart attack and died. In those days before cell phones, Jim’s brother had run to a nearby house to use the phone. Not wanting to break the news to Barbara in a phone call while she was working, her brother-in-law had called Don Rackley instead and asked him to break the news to her.

Jim’s family had had no idea that he had heart problems; his death came as a terrible shock.  

“I thank the good Lord that Chris was back home,” Barbara said.

She and her girls clung to each other in grief. And then Barbara, now a single mom with a daughter hoping to go to nursing school, knew she had to get back to work.

She hasn’t stopped since then.

Jennifer, now a registered nurse, lives in Salem, Arkansas, with her husband Jason Strong and their three daughters, Jaiden, Jaycie and Jailyn. Chris, who returned to teaching soon after her dad’s death, is married to Matthew Sprague; they live in Ozark, and Chris has taught music at Bradleyville for 24 years.

Barbara tells a story about a co-worker in the Franchester salon that always brings a laugh – but also shows the challenges and exhaustion faced by hard-working single mothers. The stylist, Peggy Bowe, worked at Baxter Lab in Mountain Home, Arkansas, and also worked a second job as a Franchester stylist while also raising two sons. “One night she went home and left Mary Shields under the dryer. Me and Fran looked around and thought, ‘Huh. I wonder who’s supposed to take care of her.’ But Peggy remembered before she got home and came back to finish Mary’s hair. She was just really tired, and she forgot Mary was still under the dryer.”

A life of kindness

While hair has been the focus of Barbara’s work for the last 50-some years, kindness has been her life’s mission. 

  “If we could all have half as kind a heart as my mom, the world would be a much better place,” her daughter Jennifer said recently. “And if she had a dollar for every free haircut she’s given to someone she felt could use a little help, she could have retired 20 years ago. Sometimes I meet people who don’t know me, but they know Mom. They always say close to the same thing: ‘I love your mom,’ or ‘Barb is wonderful,’ or ‘She’s just the nicest person.’”

 Barb’s gentle kindness had a powerful influence on her girls. “I always admired her for always doing the hair of her deceased clients,” said Chris. “She would say, ‘Well, I know how they would want it fixed.’ That made a big impression on me when I was a teenager.”

Another thing that impressed Chris and Jennifer was how their mother was “always looking for the best in people,” said Chris, referring to a time when a local man developed a notorious reputation and was eventually tried and imprisoned. 

“Mom said, ‘Well, I feel sorry for him,’” Chris remembers. “One of her co-workers said, ‘Barb, you would feel sorry for Jeffrey Dahmer!’ and Mom said, ‘Well, I do! He probably had a bad childhood.’” 

Barbara continued in the salon when it was bought by Bill Hambelton, now the Ozark County Collector. They worked together many years, and Hambelton calls her “one of the most honest, hardest-working people I’ve ever known.” 

In recent years, when Hambelton’s wife, Patsy, was battling cancer, Barbara “never stopped encouraging Patsy to remain positive,” he said. “And she was there with her arms extended for me and Zachary after Patsy passed away.  ... She is resolute in her beliefs, she never leaves you holding the bag, and if I called on her right now, she would come to my rescue.”

Barbara and Polly Huddle also worked together several years, beginning at the Franchester salon. Polly moved away for several years, but she came back almost 12 years ago and opened a new salon where Rackley Insurance had operated on the east side of the square. “I was the second one to be in the building,” Polly said. “Rackleys had been there 46 years.” 

 Barbara joined her there, and so did Michelle Anderson, who bought the salon when Polly moved away again a few years ago. Michelle and Barbara have worked together 14 years. “Her optimism and hard work have always been so inspiring to me. She’s an amazing example at age 76,” Michelle said. 

Barbara’s daughter Jennifer said she and Chris “always joked that Mom wouldn’t retire until she needed a walker to get from the shampoo bowl and back, but I guess the joke is on us since she can still work nine or 10 hours a day just fine. I know it won’t stop just because she isn’t doing hair anymore.”

Jennifer’s right. Barbara intends to keep working – but at something new. She’s learning to play the fiddle! 

“Jim played guitar and mandolin, and he could fiddle. And he led singing at church. Jennifer can sing, and Chris teaches music. It’s been on my bucket list to play the fiddle. So I’ve been taking lessons from Junior Mariott in Ava,” she said. “It’s going to take me awhile to learn it, but he hasn’t told me not to come back, so I guess I’ll keep going.” 

Barbara expressed thanks to all her friends and clients. “I’m thankful for all their support through the years. And I’m thankful that the good Lord has allowed me to work this long.”