Memphis To Miss McMillin

When he splits for his thinking stint, that town's not going to wake up with stuff like this or this in its paper: Barbers tend to be generalists -- they remember heads of hair and faces and favored topics of discussion but not necessarily names -- and so Franks and Hoselton aren't precisely sure the exact day they started working together.

They are sure of this: The shop's co-owners have been working together now for 50 years.

They started before computers, when TV sets were luxury items, when barbers could expect a regular customer to get 17 cuts a year -- one every three weeks.

They started before the Beatles were the Beatles and the long-hair fad they helped inspire ran so many of barbers out of business.

Their secret?

"You've got to get somebody that's compatible," Hoselton says.

Compatible looks like this:

Franks -- tall and lean, angles and elbows and long arms and a baritone voice that sounds like it would fit nice inside a quartet.

Hoselton -- short and sturdy, with a quiet voice filed gruff by years of pipe smoking.

Compatible sounds like this:

Hoselton -- "You do your job and that's it. It's that simple."

Franks -- "We put in the day's work and go our separate ways. It's hard to say we see each other outside of work."