Robert William Gordon Egely, 1944-2012
By Jane Switzer - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - 0 Comments
A master barber, he endured a series of gruelling hardships in his later years. Through the darkest days, his scissors kept him going.
Illustration by ian Phillips
Robert William Gordon Egely was born on June 20, 1944, in Penticton, B.C., the eldest of four children born to Wilma, a homemaker, and Clarence, a salesman. Clarence changed jobs frequently and ran a number of businesses over the years: fruit stands, bicycle repair shops, a restaurant and even a bowling alley. Bob, as he was known, spent his childhood criss-crossing the Okanagan Valley with his family. “Sometimes we would move three times in one year,” Bob’s sister Carol recalls. Perpetual new kids, they were often bullied, but Bob was their consummate defender. “He was my protector if anybody picked on us,” Carol says.
When Bob was in Grade 12, Clarence decided to become a barber and, after graduating high school in Vernon, B.C., in 1962, Bob followed in his dad’s footsteps and enrolled in a Vancouver barber school. He opened his first barbershop a few years later in Golden, B.C., where he met and fell in love with Theresa, a butcher’s apprentice who passed by his shop every morning on her way to work. The two were married in Golden on Oct. 28, 1967, and had three children: Ryan, Aaron and Nicole. Continue…
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Why men’s men are suddenly sporting the side sweep
By Alex Ballingall - Tuesday, January 10, 2012 at 1:40 PM - 0 Comments
David Cameron and George Clooney are among those whose haircuts hearken to history
Photograph by Cole Garside
Shortly after a poll of British women overwhelmingly deemed Prime Minister David Cameron to be “the greatest male chauvinist” of the country’s party leaders, he decided to get a haircut. The Conservative PM adopted the “side sweep” —a low side part flowing into a variably sized tuft of hair on top, with the sides swept back—in a possible attempt to “woo women voters,” according to the Daily Mail. Interestingly, it’s the same haircut sported by Don Draper, the hard-boozing and adulterous advertising executive from the award-winning TV show, Mad Men.
Cameron is just the latest to hop on the hottest trend in men’s hairstyles. Canada’s Ryan Gosling sports the look. So does his Ides of March co-star, George Clooney. And now packs of men are flocking to retrograde barbershops to go under the clippers and adopt a look that hearkens back to the strict military haircuts of the early 20th century, as well as the dos sported by James Dean and Johnny Cash in the golden years of postwar America.
“You would have only got this haircut in the U.K. back in the ’30s and ’40s,” says Alan Brown, the go-to barber at Garrison’s, a quaint men’s shop in Toronto’s hipster-dominated west end. A majority of the 50 to 70 haircuts he does every week are of this style. “There’s a lot of younger people walking around with it, which is making it very popular at the moment,” says Brown, 34, wearing a variation of the look himself, which he laughingly likens to Johnny Depp’s in the 1990 movie Cry-Baby.
