A landmark is gone

Pye keeps father’s legacy alive at new Classic Cuts Barber Shop location

By St. Clair Murraine
Outlook Staff Writer

Christmas was at least a month away so Ben Pye was a little taken aback when his father gifted him a briefcase during Thanksgiving.

 It was filled with clippers, a brush, comb and every other tool that a barber uses. Showing up with the hair-cutting tools was Pye’s father’s last-ditch effort to convince him to become a barber.

“He said, you don’t have any excuse now,” Pye recalled his father saying after handing off the briefcase. “I want you to go to barber college.”

Within a few months, he was on his way to completing the training and eventually earning a license to cut hair. His welding career became a part-time job.

Pye was now on a path that led to his father’s creation of Classic Cuts Barber Shop. It became a fixture in the Black community on the south side of town, first on west Orange Avenue before moving a short distance east on the same street close to the intersection of South Meridian Street.

The white wooden building with a front porch became a landmark during the three decades that it was used as a barber shop. The end came for the building in mid-August when it was demolished.

Pye wasn’t there to see it, although he knew that day would come. His family negotiated the deal to sell the property in 2021 to the city to make room for construction of a bus transfer station in the area.

His mother, Mercedes, encouraged the sale of the building, Pye said. He hedged for as long as he could until the age of the building hastened his decision to move out.

“I didn’t have any heat or air inside there,” Pye said. “I had to buy several fans to keep the place cool during the summertime. Then, right over my station a leak came in. Water was all over my station. Man, it was a mess. And the floor started buckling up.”

Other problem popped up as the building aged. Holes in the floor allowed rodents to crawl in and leave a mess. It also became a place where vagrants spent the night.

“I’d walked up there at morning time and there would be three or four of them there,” Pye said. “I would tell them they have to get up and go.”

Pye left on July 17, the same day he moved to a new location inside of a strip mall in suite 12 at 1140 Capital Circle Southeast. 

Pye has a single chair in the area where he trims. A flat screen television hangs overhead and the surroundings are sparkling clean.

It is removed from what Pye remembers of the first shop where his father worked in the early 1963. It was known as the Boy’s Barbershop located at the intersection of Manatee and Holton streets. 

Pye’s family eventually moved to Daytona. After returning to Tallahassee, his father later moved around to a few shops before eventually landing at Gilliams Brothers Barbershop in Frenchtown. The next move was to Classic Cuts.

In his new location, Pye has leased two other small rooms in the building. He intends to sub-lease them to barbers who meet his requirements and have a clientele.

“This place here is perfect for me and my customers,” said Pye, 76. “You’ve got plenty of parking, plenty of restaurants here and right on the main drive.”

Navy veteran Robert Lee Jackson was getting a hair cut when a visitor walked in. He estimates that he’s been Pye’s client for about 10 years. Previously he was a longtime customer at another shop on South Adams Street until the music got too loud and the tone of conversations not to his liking.

“I can go where I don’t have to hear that so I left and I came to Mr. Pye,” he said.

Jackson said he doesn’t regret switching barbers.

“Every time I come, I can get a haircut that I’m perfectly happy with,” he said. “A military-type haircut.”

Pye cuts his hair with the same consistency that he had back in the days when he served in the military.

“We had guys who had this much hair,” he said, pointing to his fresh low cut. “They all looked like me. In the Navy I always kept my hair short with a part. That was my military style.”

Jackson seemingly relishes the new digs on Capital Circle and expressed satisfaction with Pye decision to move from Orange Avenue.

“Oldness has to give way to newness,” Jackson said.

Pye takes away a variation of memories from the old building. It was once a bustling barbershop with multiple barbers. They left and Pye hesitated about replacing them.

“I was too afraid to blow the name Classic Cuts that my daddy had created,” he said. “We had a whole lot of barbers in there, but the last five or six years it was just my father and I before he passed. 

“Once I was there by myself I didn’t have any more barbers come in. I had barbers who wanted to come in but I had to close the shop down at 4:30 to go to my night job and I just didn’t have the kind of barber that wanted to come in. I didn’t want barbers in there smoking week or selling weed. We had a clientele of really important people, police officer, judges, all kinds of people.”

Pye will have a lot of stories to share about the old building. One of them is bound to be about the day he was cutting a law enforcement officer’s hair and a drug dealer walked into the shop.

“Marijuana was all over,” Pye said. “The smell was so strong up in there.”

That got the officer’s attention. 

“He said I’m real hard on people with drugs, but he said as Mr. Pye is my barber, and you came here for him to cut your hair,” Pye recalled. “I tell you what I want you go do. I want you to go in the bathroom and flush it all down the commode.”

The man with the drug assured the officer that he’d flushed it in the toilet. It turned out that the dealer left the drug under the trash can liner. After the discovery, the law enforcement officer flushed it.

Early on in his career as a barber, Pye worked as a welder. He eventually took another job as foreman of Building Services for the city of Tallahassee, a position he held for 10 years before going to barbering fulltime.

He has established an extensive list of clientele, although he might take an occasional walk-in. 

Pye’s name has become synonymous with cutting hair under the name Classic Cuts. It’s a legacy that he cherishes.

“It feels good to me,” he said. “All the times I’m in the grocery store and I see guys saying ‘hey Mr. Pye, you remember me.’ It makes me feel real good that I’ve been able to serve the community for as many years as I have. I haven’t had any problem at all.”