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It was a sad time last week for some area men. Dave Holthaus, a barber since 1960, is taking down his red, white and blue pole, unbolting the vintage swiveling chair and calling it quits.

His customers took it hard. “They hate to lose their barbers,” Holthaus said. “There aren’t many barbers left.”

Indeed, in Onalaska there’s only Tom’s Barber Shop on Main Street now, which used to be Holthaus’s shop until he sold it 31 years ago, the first time he thought he’d get out of the haircutting business. After selling his shop, he ran a supper club and bowling alley in Ettrick with his brother-in-law for a time and then sold advertising for an area shopper before taking up his clippers again 20 years ago in his one-chair shop on Second Avenue South.

The jokes were flying as he trimmed up his last two customers Friday — his son, David, and David’s friend Kelly Buckholtz — a hallmark of a visit to Dave’s Barber Shop. Through the years, Holthaus was always ready with a supply of jokes should the conversation hit a dry spell.

Being a good conversationalist is as important for a barber as knowing how to do a “high and tight,” which is what Buckholtz wanted the day before he headed to Fort McCoy for three weeks of annual training with the Wisconsin Army National Guard.

“A barber is a poor man’s psychiatrist,” Holthaus said.

In high school, Holthaus wasn’t sure what he was going to do with his life, so when his barber, Gordy Clark, suggested that he go to barber school after graduation, he went and talked with his parents about it and decided Clark had a good idea.

There was a waiting list to get into the nine-month barber school in Green Bay, so after receiving his diploma with the other 42 members of the Onalaska High School Class of 1958, he went to work in the foundry at the American Motors plant in Kenosha.

When Holthaus got out of barber school, he came back to Onalaska and worked in a three-chair shop on Onalaska’s Main Street with Gordy Clark and Bob Gullickson, father of the famous tennis-playing twins, Tim and Tom. He remembers those days fondly. “We laughed all the time,” he said.

His brush with fame came one Labor Day weekend when he had just returned from a trip up north and found a giant of a man walking up the ramp of his barber shop. It was Brock Lesnar, an NCAA national wrestling champion who at the time was a pro wrestler, in town for a bout at the La Crosse Center.

Lesnar talked Holthaus into giving him a haircut, and he remembers Lesnar, barely fitting in the chair, suggesting that maybe Holthaus ought to be a Vikings fan instead of rooting for the Packers. “Careful, you wouldn’t want me to hurt you,” Holthaus remembers telling Lesnar.

Now that he is retired, he can play some more golf, maybe some poker at the Onalaska American Legion, spend more time with his son and grandson (also named David) and visit his brother in Washington and daughter Debbra in Massachusetts.

The hair will still hit the floor at Dave’s Barber Shop, though. Diane Bean has bought the building and plans to open a two-chair salon there after some remodeling.

“I hope she has as much fun and success as I’ve had here,” Holthaus said.

Contact Randy Erickson at randy.erickson@lee.net or (608) 786-6812.