A haircut and a life lesson from an old friend
Oral “Ben” Correll, the local barber who cut my hair when I was a kid in the small eastern Illinois town of Oblong, had fought and was wounded in the Battle of Iwo Jima with Alpha Company/1st Battalion/28th Marine Regiment/5th Marine Division during World War II. I always looked up to him for being a Marine and for being friendly with a homespun philosophy and a way of telling a story I’ll never forget.
“Heard any good ones lately?” he’d ask and tell you a dozen amusing or thought-provoking stories. Or he’d tell me about a new book he’d just read and ask me what I was reading. In later years, our high school basketball team all came to him for flattop haircuts so level the bubble on a carpenter’s tool wouldn’t move.
The early barbershop he shared with another barber in the basement at the town’s four-way stop was a meeting place of sorts where men gathered, not only for a haircut, but to swap stories with one another while waiting their turn and maybe to pick up a book or magazine to take home. There was no television in the area at the time. Ben and his partner kept a basket full of books and magazines that anyone could take what they wanted to read. Customers brought in ones for the basket that they’d read. There were no appointments, and you got your hair cut when your turn came up. I always waited for Ben to cut mine.
When I was 9 or 10 years old in the late ’40s, I climbed up in his chair one Saturday afternoon and asked him to give me a haircut like the Marines got when they went to boot camp.
Ben Correll in the Marine Corps
He laughed and said, “Does your dad know you’re going to get it cut like that?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, lying quickly. “We came to town to get the truck greazed, and he gave me 50 cents to get my hair cut. He’s over at the pool room playin’ pool.”
Ben smiled broadly as he spread the apron over me with a flare like a bullfighter spreading his cape in front of a charging bull, tied the tie around my neck, took the clippers and made three or four quick swipes over my head, the hair floated quickly to the ground, he untied the string, shook the apron, and with a twinkle in his eyes, asked, “How’s this?”
I looked in the mirror behind him and said, “That’s good. That how you looked after you got your boot camp haircut in the Marines?”
“Something like that,” he said, laughing again when I handed him a half a dollar for the haircut. He handed me back a dime. “You better have a dime today to get a double dip of ice cream. You might need it.”
He usually gave me a nickel.
My father didn’t say a word until we got a mile or so north of town. Then he turned to look at me and said, “You look like a striped-assed ape.”
That’s all he ever said. Ben laughed when I told him the next time I got a haircut. As I grew older, I asked him about Iwo Jima. It was years before he would say much. But when I came home on leave from the Marine Corps or when I was in town, I always stopped by the barbershop to talk with him. Then when I was in college, I interviewed him about his experience on Iwo Jima and later wrote a longer article about Ben several years ago when I was editing The Spearhead News for the Fifth Marine Division Association. It was the best story he ever told me.
See the Spring 2008 issue of Spearhead to read what he said about getting wounded on D+3 and getting taken to the hospital ship.
“As I was being winched over the side of a hospital ship the next morning, I turned on my side and looked back at the Rock,” he said. “It was just before noon. And there on the top of Suribachi, a bleak sky in the background with the sun’s rays shining on it just a little, was one of the most beautiful sites I’ll ever see: The flag stood out in technicolor against the drab background.
“It had to be the second flag,” he added, his eyes watering as he spoke. “But it was a real tearjerker. I’ll never see anything like it again.”