![]() ![]() Moe, a family man who often has breakfast at the nearby Floridian restaurant, has been a customer of Adamo's for 20 years. "That's true," confirms longtime Broward County Circuit Judge Leroy Moe, who most recently was one of the judges presiding over the Kathy Willets sex scandal. "There was a time," says one observer, "when you could go into Ben's Barber Shop, listen to the scuttlebutt about an upcoming election, and call the outcome accurately within a couple of points." Adamo himself was approaching middle age when he opened the place. In great measure, that's because the Las Olas Barber Shop was keyed to the pulse of an older generation who did get haircuts: the pundits and politicians who ran Broward County. "I had to let a lot of barbers go in the years between Woodstock and disco. "That was a rough time," Adamo acknowledges. A brass spittoon rests high enough on a shelf that nobody will use it, and a few feet away is the rocking chair where Adamo relaxes when business is slow.Īdamo has survived trends, fads and, from the late '60s to the late '70s, the bleakest decade in the history of the haircut, a time when it seemed no man under the age of 30 had his locks clipped more than twice a year. Inside, there are three vintage barber chairs and three sinks, a decades-old DeWitt porcelain instrument sterilizer, a hand-crank cash register and a black-and-white portable television tuned to CNN, the shop's only reminder that this is the '90s, not the '50s. "Every once in a while, somebody offers to buy it," Adamo chuckles. ![]() In 1951 he drifted south to Fort Lauderdale - he was still spending summers in Cape Cod, running a barber shop for the seasonal trade - and the shop he opened on Broward County's oldest main street hasn't changed much in the years since.įrom the sidewalk, one thing sets Ben's Barber Shop apart from the area's horde of unisex salons: the motorized, glass-encased barber pole that spins just outside the front door. Adamo got his barber license in Jacksonville in 1939. In 1937 Adamo dropped out of law school and went to work for a New England barber who spent his summers in Cape Cod and his winters in Florida. That seemed to me like an easy way to make a couple of bucks." ![]()
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