Snellville barber snips away for half-century

"All right, Bill, you look better," Peanut says matter-of-factly as he wraps up and collects $10.

"Have a good day, Peanut," the customer replies, ambling out the door.

One by one, customers file into Peanut's two-chair barbershop, each waiting his turn for Snellville's master barber. Some days, they'll wait a few minutes; others for several hours. There are no appointments. It's first-come, first-served.

November will mark Peanut's 51st year (50th in Snellville) as a barber -- a  field some believe is evaporating with the rise of posh hair salons that deliver coffee and cookies with shampoos and coifed ‘dos.

"This is a barbershop; it's not one of those salons," Peanut insists.

He has difficulty even saying the word without cracking a smile, sneering or whispering.

"Salons are where all the girls work," he says with a chuckle. "They use all those blow-dryers."

Still, hairstylists often flock to Dalton's Barber Shop to watch him work. After all, Peanut has a knack for flattops. A few even have tried to recruit his services, he says. Each time, he rejects the offer.

In the late 1980s, Peanut was twice named “Best Old-Fashioned Barber” by the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce, but that's not what keeps him in business.

"He gives you a good haircut at a good price," says Emmett Clower, Snellville's once-longtime mayor, who frequented Peanut's shop in the '60s. "Plus, it's sort of a meeting place. That's where you find out what's going on."

The silver-haired, bespectacled Peanut operates solo out of the tiny shop on Main Street. Attached to the storefront is a classic barber pole. Inside, hanging on the walls are deer heads, assorted pictures and a caricature of a University of Georgia football player signed by coach Mark Richt.

The shop is often filled with laughter or talk of sports or politics. That suits longtime client Mike Weingarten just fine.

"It's Mayberry. Everyone knows everyone," says Weingarten, who's been coming to Peanut for 10 to 12 years. "It doesn't take but two to three visits to become old standard."

Also old standard is the barber's nickname, derived from his childhood stature. Shortly after his birth in 1940, Dalton dwindled from 3 pounds, 9 ounces to 2 pounds, 5 ounces.

"They put me in a shoebox at night and wrapped me up in a blanket," he says. "They didn't think I was going to make it."

Shortly after graduating from Central Gwinnett High School in 1959, Peanut saw an ad for a barber school in Atlanta, so he decided to give it a whirl. He paid $25 to enroll and $50 a month for the next six months.

He delivered his first haircut on Nov. 20, 1959.

His first job was in Winder, where he charged $1.25 a cut. In July 1960, he picked up shifts in Snellville, charging 75 cents.

In those days, Snellville had 400 residents. Peanut remembers cutting hair six days a week, often until 10 at night. Sometimes, he'd snip away until 12:30 in the morning.

Nowadays, Peanut works four 11-hour days during the week. He also puts in a few hours on Saturday, the only day he makes house calls for people too sick or old to venture out.

His oldest client? 104. His youngest? Six months.

Van Snell, 43, has been a customer of Peanut's since he was 5 or 6 years old.

"To us, this is the last historical thing about Snellville. Everything else is gone," says Snell, whose family founded the Gwinnett County municipality.

"You can't get no better haircut," says Buster Reese, 48, who drives 30 miles from Good Hope to Snellville for a flattop.

Peanut estimates he cuts 15 to 18 heads of hair a day; 25 years ago, he did twice that number. Since then, his clients, many of them old-timers, have moved away or died, he says.

As for his profession, he fears today's hair-cutting generation, even the males, are more interested in attending beauty schools than barber schools.

"Most of the guys don't want to work like I do," Peanut muses. "My doctor doesn't even know how I stood up this long."

Despite those fears, statistics show that barbers are still around, though not as ubiquitous as hairdressers, hairstylists and cosmetologists.

Nationwide in 2008, there were 53,500 working barbers compared with 630,700 hairdressers, hairstylists and cosmetologists, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By 2018, the number of barbers is expected to climb to 59,700, while the number of hairdressers, hairstylists and cosmetologists is expected to leap to 757,700, the bureau predicts.

Peanut has no plans to leave the profession, even by 2018. And even if he gives up his shop, a barber chair waits in the garage of his home in Social Circle.

"I don't want to retire," he says. "I've got about 30 more years to go."