Amazing secrets were shared in Lodi's barber shops of yesteryear

When I was a kid, one of the most interesting streets in town was Lodi Avenue, the part that extended east from the little firehouse on the corner of Lodi Avenue and Sacramento Street out to Cherokee Lane.

What made the street unique was that, except for a short segment of Lockeford Street, it was the only street in town with a railroad track running down the middle. We put pennies on the track to have the train squash them, and always with the worry that the train would derail because of our indiscretion.

The track was owned by a traction company; various kinds of produce were hauled from someplace beyond Cherokee to some other place along the real railroad tracks. As a kid, I never did know where it started or ended up.

I did know about a place called the Roundhouse which had a bar (therefore forbidden to brats my age), pool tables (which started with a "p" and that rhymes with "t" and that stood for verboten) and there were enough smokers in there that when the door was opened, you'da swore the joint was on fire.

The stories emanating from that bar were legend and are still being bandied about, growing more incredible as the years pass. There was a waitress working there who was so strong, it was said she could pinch lead BB pellets in two with her fingernails.

She was about five feet tall and weighed 300 pounds. They didn't need a bouncer on her shift.

Across from the bar was the original Robinson's Feed Store. It was old when I saw it for the first time. It was made of those big cement bricks and it smelled wonderful. The smell was a combination of new-mown hay and saddle leather that still makes me want go sit on a horse and pretend I am the Lone Ranger. When I was a little boy, my horse was a really faithful broom which I rode the length of Lodi Avenue, looking for rustling sidewinders and other crooks from the Jesse James Gang.

When I graduated to bikes (with playing cards clothespinned to the fork to make motor noises in the spokes), the criminals were from the New York and Chicago venues where crime was big, but it was still essentially non-existent in Lodi. As Casey Stengel used to say, "You could look it up."

I believe there were more murders in Lodi in the last couple of years than there were in the first hundred.

Later, I wanted to be a fireman (the guy who drove the truck) and then a California Highway Patrolman on a motorcycle. A "bike" that didn't need playing cards on the spokes to make a ton of noise, but it came with a license that would have let me wear a gun and go as fast as I wanted.

Lodi Avenue at one time was the barber shop capital of California. They were all located in converted residences. I used to go to Al Patzer who took an hour to give a haircut. Ten minutes to cut the hair and the rest of the time to see to it that not one hair was out of place, all for the insanely inflationary (kid) price of 75 cents.

I had my very first beer in that barber shop. It was Lodi's answer to Mayberry, USA, the epitome of a man's social experience.

Boys in Lodi learned about beer (even if they weren't exactly old enough), learned about women (if they looked old enough ... the boys, not the women), cars (even if they had a bike standing in front of the barber shop), fishing (even if they puked riding a boat bigger than the park boats out at the lake), hunting (even if the only gun at home was a 12-gauge that would set you right on your can when you pulled the trigger).

In short, barber shops and the stuff that went on in them was the ritual that turned a boy into a man. That was one of the reasons my uncle struck out, as it were, when he took me fishing to teach me the facts of life. He was at least three years too late. Let's put it this way, by that time, I knew a bird from a bee and then some.

There was one more thing unique about Lodi Avenue — there is still one lot on the 500 block that has stood empty since before the early '30s. But then, a hundred Lodi Avenue businesses have come and gone since the '40s. Who says we aren't progressive? (Hmm ... wonder how a barber shop would do on that empty lot?)

Bob Bader is a local writer and chiropractor.