Dirk Chatelain: AUBURN, Neb. — On a Thursday in November, at a nursing home just before dawn, a 97-year-old man took his last breath.
Elly Ingersoll hunted pheasants and chased golf balls. He loved Lawrence Welk and Golden Gloves. Before dinner, he drank a vodka and Coke.
For 68 years he cut hair on the same block downtown. Businesses came and left. Faces and names changed. But hair keeps growing.
Start with the clippers. Outline around the ears. Taper it up. Scissors the top. Kick ’em out.
Five steps, 15 minutes. But that’s not why they came from all over southeast Nebraska to the shoebox of a shop in a 19th-century brick building.
They came for the Ingersoll shortcuts.
The unwritten tufts of wisdom. The unspoken clumps of truth. The strands that bind fathers and sons.
Elly didn’t have brothers or sisters. His wife, his dogs and his job were long gone.
But there was someone sitting beside him that Thursday morning. His business partner, his only child, the boy who followed Elly from the fields of Nemaha County to the islands of the Pacific Ocean and, finally, to the smallest storefront window at the busiest intersection in Auburn.
The next morning, just before Friday dawn, Joe Ingersoll climbed on his motorcycle and rode three cold miles. He unlocked the shop door and flipped the sign in the window.
“Open.”
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