Heir of hair: Son follows in barber father's footsteps

“Dad did not want me to work here,” Aaron said. “He wanted me to go to school.”

Aaron agreed.

“I never thought I’d end up working here,” he said.

But after a few years of college at the University of Arizona and Pima Community College and working mostly as a waiter, the idea began to grow on him.

He figured there were three careers that would provide a steady income – bartender, mortician and barber. Plus he and his two older brothers practically grew up with their parents in the Hermosa, hanging out there or at the drug store next door, the Catalina Theater, Tahoe Park or Bookmans. Hermosa, essentially, was family.

“I didn’t want to drive by the shop one day and say ‘That was the family business.’ And one way, the only way (to keep that) was to become a barber myself.”

“Sure beats waiting tables,” he said. “Better hours, better money.”

So in 2005 he took up the scissors and worked with his dad, until Hector’s death in 2015. Since then he’s run the shop, and Josephine still works, part time, in the beauty shop.

Aaron has kept his father’s chair and work station pretty much as it was when Hector was cutting hair beside him and still employs Hector’s well-worn red wooden-plank booster seat for children’s cuts.

“It’s older than me,” Aaron said. “I’ve got guys coming in here who say “That’s what I used to sit on.’”

And Aaron’s surmise that barbering was steady work seems to have panned out. The shops and businesses surrounding the building have come and gone, a few torn down completely, but Hermosa, the lone survivor, clips along, entirely on word of mouth.

“People ask “Why don’t you advertise?’ Because I don’t need to. It’s kept us open for 80 years.”