Baylor Line MAgazine
With over 75 years of storytelling under its belt, the award-winning Baylor Line Magazine is now available digitally. Support this vital, independent voice of Baylor alumni by becoming a member today!
With over 75 years of storytelling under its belt, the award-winning Baylor Line Magazine is now available digitally. Support this vital, independent voice of Baylor alumni by becoming a member today!
7 thoughts on “Ervin Davis, The Legendary Baylor Barber”
Ervin Davis was my barber all four and a half years that I was at Baylor. Flat Top haircuts were in vogue back then and Ervin was the best at cutting them. Just before he retired I dropped by the shop in the Union Building and had a great visit with him. He didn’t remember me at first but when I told him I was one of the group from Pittsburg, Texas he remembered. A great barber and a great person.
Mr. Davis has always had the sweetest, Christ-like spirit. In the mid-1980’s, he would cut my hair and tell me of the mission trip from which he just got back and where God is sending him on the next one. As a young man trying to find his way in this life, I will never forget him or how he set an example of what it looks like to lead a humble life of a devoted Christian man.
Nicely done. Ervin was my barber when I was a Baylor student in the late 1950’s. I returned to Baylor in 1990 as a professor in the School of Education. Ervin became my barber again, and he still is! I report to him faithfully every 2-3 weeks and enjoy his old jokes and stories about “cutting hair at Baylor.”
Samuel Clemens in his work About Barbers proclaims,
“All things change accept (sic) barbers, and the surrounding of barbers.
These never change. What one experiences in a barber’s shop the first time he enters one is what he always experiences in barber’s shops afterward till the end of his days”.
I must part with Twain, here’s why:
The Initiate
or
When Barbers Ruled
In the barbershop,
Sitting for my first and last
Shave and a haircut,
I give the Shibboleth knock:
As the barber clips and slices hair, I ask
For what does your stripe pole stand?
He replies the blue is for water – the pool
His partner when prompted by him upon his failing recall says,
The red is for blood – the letting.
Together they reply the white for care – the bandage.
I doze… and am in a time before,
Suddenly these were ancient holy men
And this a holy place.
Here were rites performed
The celebrated rites of inclusion and incision
Of prayer and passage
Of birth and death and rebirth
Censors of oils, vapors, and tinctures swung
Confessions were made; absolutions given,
Secrets of old disseminated.
Still were the rhythms of razor and stone, steel to strap so soothing
Slice!
I awake to my cut face
He rinses the wound and applies a bandage.
Now even that is plastic.
John Smith
1981
Ervin is my uncle . He passed away yesterday as alit if you may know by now . Funeral st Connally Compton Funeral Home Monday at 11
So sorry to hear of his passing. Comfort be with his family. Jan Shiller
What a kind and honorable man, and a member of the Greatest Generation (Second World War).