MANKATO — Click here to see a photo gallery from Dan's Barber Shop.





Click here to listen to an audio slideshow of Dan's Barber Shop produced by MSU professor Dave Engen at Voices From the Valley.



It’s a weekday morning and Dan’s Barber Shop, as usual, is humming with bullroar.

Bad Viagra jokes, hunting stories, sports chat, bemoanings about assorted ailments, insult humor. It’s all here, with topics changing on the fly as men come and go.

Another longtime customer comes through the door:

“Anyone know if there’s a barbershop around here?” the man says.

A middling quip at best, but barbers Dan Quaderer and Mark Weingartz give the guy his due and laugh anyway.

Dan’s is a real barber shop. Not too many of those around anymore. In fact, haircuts here conclude with a hot lather and razor cleanup around the ears.

The barbers take pride in that.

“It’s an old-fashioned practice that’s fallen by the wayside,” Weingartz says.

Come Oct. 31, Quaderer also will fall by the wayside, so to speak. He’s retiring after 45 years of plying his trade at his namesake business, which will barber on under Weingartz’s ownership.

Quaderer and his wife will head to Arizona, where they’ve spent portions of winters the past few years.

He’ll be back in spring, when he’ll help break in his replacement, perhaps giving him the same advice Quaderer’s old barbering instructor proffered decades ago.

“He said there are three things a barber shouldn’t do: Don’t talk religion, don’t talk politics, and never say ‘whoops.’”

Quaderer opened his barbershop in the brand new Belle Mar Mall in 1964.

He’s the mall’s longest continuous merchant, but when he started his business as a 24-year-old, anxiety took hold.

Belle Mar on Mankato’s hilltop was the city’s first mall, and when he looked out the window, he didn’t see much more than cornfields.

“A barber from downtown said, ‘You know, you’re way too far out in the country here. You’ll never make it.’ I had just signed a 10-year lease and I got scared. What if he’s right?”

Here’s why Dan’s Barber Shop — any barbershop really — makes a go of it: Relationships.

Cutting hair is only part of it. Calling customers by name as they come in, letting them talk about themselves, and putting them in a male-enclave comfort zone is what separates independent barbers from in-and-out haircutting chains.

If a customer is having a bad day, Quaderer challenges himself to get him to laugh before he leaves. Personal information about customers is filed away for the next time they come in.

Thirty-year customers aren’t uncommon at Dan’s, and some have been barbered there nearly as long as he’s been open.

One customer, Neil Lillo, even wrote a poem about the shop when it observed its 40th anniversary.

The ode to Quaderer and his now-retired partner of 43 years Jim Wintheiser hangs in a frame behind Quaderer’s chair.

Quaderer says Wintheiser was almost like a brother to him — a joke-teller extraordinaire with a memory like a steel trap. If there are two more important qualities for a barber to possess, they have yet to be revealed.

When Wintheiser retired, Quaderer feared he’d have to close because barbers have become a scarce lot, and he needed a partner.

Enter Weingartz, a Carlson Craft supervisor who was ready for a career change.

Quaderer and Wintheiser made their pitch, and Weingartz took them up on it and went to barbering school, thus assuring that Dan’s will live on.

There’s a case to be made that barbershops are among America’s last true civic forums.

Coffee shop clientele try to solve the world’s problems too, but they do it in cliques. Beer-and-a-shot bars? Those male bastions have largely given way to co-ed pop stands.

In a barbershop, guys from all walks of life and social strata are affixed in one room, with the barbers serving as moderators, agitators and, sometimes, peacemakers.

“They’re good at engaging you in what they think you’re interested in,” says Minnesota State professor Don Friend, who became a customer four years ago.

“They’re not just dumb guys that cut hair. They’re bright guys who have found a fascinating way to make a living.”

A barbershop isn’t the “Oprah” show. Delving into personal pain and gut-wrenching emotion isn’t its province.

Yet when it does happen, here’s how it goes down:

Weingartz says a customer awhile back was talking about his medical condition. The chat was moving along innocuously until the guy matter-of-factly said he had six months to live.

The hush that fell over the room was palpable. Then the man made a small joke about it, and the shop’s 400-square-foot world began spinning again.

On Dan’s walls are mounted fish, wildlife prints, and dozens of vintage photos, donated by customers, that depict life the way it was in the Mankato area.

Here’s a little irony: Quaderer is leaving his customers, but his customers aren’t necessarily leaving him.

Again this winter he’ll barber part-time in Arizona — and trim the heads of fellow Mankato snowbirds wintering in the same area.

Retirement is a relative term for Quaderer, and that’s the way he wants it.

“I’ll work two days a week and play five — works for me.”