My mother grew up on my grandparents’ dairy farm in rural Taneytown, Maryland. My father’s hometown was rural Greenfield, Massachusetts, and he enjoyed spending time on a farm his relatives operated. As a child, my family lived in the busy New York suburbs in Connecticut. Both parents couldn’t wait for summertime to get back to the country. They would load us kids in our Chevy station wagon the moment school ended, and we spent the full summer in the Green Mountains of Vermont. Looking back, my siblings and I can see clearly how they made a point of having us to spend time with down-to-earth folks. Though we missed our school friends, we enjoyed spending summers among country carpenters, farmers with ancestors back to the 1700s, storekeepers and good ole country hobos with glossed eyes wearing plaid shirts. Let me tell you, it was some contrast to the business, marketing and television executives we knew in our New York City area.

When I was something like seven, my mother took me and four of my brothers for haircuts to a barber in Shushan, New York. At that time, circa 1965, it was a small community of mostly dairy farmers and people in other industries related to agriculture. The barbershop was located in that tiny village near a country store named Yushak’s, which we frequented. After we pulled into a driveway, we peered out the car window at an old yellow, clapboarded house. Our mother explained that the barber had his shop at home. We usually had our haircuts in a regular barbershop in Arlington, Vermont, ten miles north. This is a little different, we thought.

Inside, a slender white-haired man named Al, who appeared to be around 80 years old, greeted us. Al took us to his living room. One after the other, he gave the five of us haircuts in a traditional barber’s chair. The rest of us sat in lounge chairs or on his couch. I remember reaching out to grab and pet his white and orange tabby cat as it walked across the top of the couch behind our heads.

Country folks made my mother feel at home. As she always did with them, she happily chatted away with Al as he barbered our hair. As I recall, our mother payed Al fifty cents for each of our cuts, quite a bargain, even back then. Years passed, and my brothers and I forgot that barber’s name. However, we reminisced about our haircuts when we drove past that yellow house.

I never had reason to suspect I would one day learn the full identity of that barber. But last night, a woman named Anita Marie contacted me on FB and told me her grandfather was a Norman Rockwell model and barber in Shushan, New York. I replied, “We went to a barber in a house in Shushan in about 1965. He was something like eighty years old.” Anita Marie replied, “That would be my grandfather, Alva Roberson.” And so we reminisced about Shushan and her grandfather. Known to friends as Alvy, he posed in seventeen paintings Norman created for Brown and Bigelow Co.’s Four Seasons calendars.

Anita also sent me an article from American Weekly Magazine, in which Norman reminisced about discovering our barber. Here’s the story, as Norman told it. By the early fifties, he had “practically exhausted” the supply of models in Arlington after painting “a goodly percentage” of its 1,400 residents. He began riding his bicycle from West Arlington to Shushan village, which is primarily a flat, scenic route alongside the Battenkill River. I’d say the ride, which I’ve done, is about eight miles. (The last mile is downhill, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Norman had to get off his bike and walk some, although his son Jarvis tells me his father had a black English racing bike.) Back then, he would have passed lots of cows grazing in the meadows next to the mountains.)

Norman was a member of the Grange, so I imagine one of the first places he looked for models was at the Shushan hall, where he discovered Alva. When his business was slow, Norman said that Alva worked at the local seed company. Agriculture was big back then. Alvy was also an amateur dramatic actor. When Norman visited him at his home, across the railroad tracks just beyond Yushak’s, Norman took note of the blue- and red-striped barber’s sign tacked next to his door and the traditional barber shop chair inside. Norman had loved that sort of decor ever since he moved from the city of New Rochelle, NY to enjoy a simpler life and to paint quaint faces. I’m guessing the chair was the one I had sat in 12 or so years later.

Norman eventually used Alva in seventeen calendar paintings as spirited characters, including as a square dancer, diving into a river, having tea with a lady, and beating a sore loser at checkers. Norman often paired him with Shushan postmaster, an avid fisherman named Al Prindle, who was approaching his elderly years at the time. Prindle posed for other paintings as a fisherman. For the square-dance photo above, Norman had a man steady Prindle in the studio so he could “prance on one leg,” the artist said in American Weekly. Incidentally, Norman’s favorite recreational activity was square dancing on the Green in West Arlington. Mrs. Prindle found the portrayals of her husband less than flattering, according to Norman. Prindle playfully told Norman “not to mind because women are temperamental, like trout,”