The William Marvy Company of St. Paul by Curt Brown

Author:Curt Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2015-03-01T16:00:00+00:00

These logbooks, kept in the Marvy Company vault, include every serial number, model number and day of manufacture of the eighty-five thousand poles made since 1950. Photo by Curt Brown.

Bill’s son, Bob Marvy, has shared his six decades with all those barber poles. He was not quite two when his father and Bill Harris emerged from the basement with the first one in 1950. Family lore said his dad let him flip the switch.

At the barber supply show in San Francisco in 1956, William Marvy’s sons, eleven-year-old Jim and eight-year-old Bob, manned the family business booth. Courtesy of the Marvy family.

Amid the boxes and scrapbooks in the conference room archives, there’s a photograph taken in 1956, when Bob was eight and his big brother, Jim, was eleven. They’re manning their old man’s booth at the barber supply trade show in San Francisco. The boys sit in their sports coats, surrounded by barber poles and a sign claiming that these are “The World’s Best Barber Poles.”

A big man like his father, Bob has kept the business afloat through all the lean years. In 2014, the company filled 598 orders for barber poles, which come in seven different models with various wall mounts and stands. They range from the eighteen-inch-tall Model 410 for about $500 to the signature Model 55, which remains twenty-eight inches with sixteen inches of glass. The two-light model, with a round white globe on top, goes for about $700, depending on which dealer, catalogue or website you use. You can get the granddaddy of them all, the forty-seven-inch, two-light Model 824 for roughly $1,000 through the popular Bowman Beauty and Supply Catalogue. There are also Models 77, 88 and 33.

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