Clay Tankersly thought he was going to take over his father’s farm after he graduated high school. His family owned a nice plot of land on the highway just outside of Wilmore’s rolling hills, and Clay had no reason to consider anything else. He saw a future of green grass and quiet breezes, with acres of land ripe for staking out his own legacy. He could continue his father’s American dream.
Enter Gene Brandenburg, a friend of Tankersly who had graduated a few years before. Brandenburg had a year under his belt in Wilmore’s barber shop and wanted some help.
“At 18 years old, it didn’t matter to me what I was doing the next week,” Tankersly said, “much less 10 years down the road.”
Brandenburg convinced his friend to enroll in barber school in Louisville for the summer. The program was usually a grueling six months, but Tankersly breezed through it in five. On the way back to Wilmore, he stopped by the state inspector’s house in Lexington so he could start working before the standard inspections were held two months later.
That happened in November 1956, five days after the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket stomped its way to a second term in the White House. Tankersly is now 81 and still giving haircuts in the same Wilmore barbershop, even though Brandenburg left the shop almost 40 years ago.
“I’ve been barbering a while,” Tankersly said, “and people ask me, ‘Why didn’t you go to Lexington out of barber school and make more money?’ Money’s fine, but being satisfied in your mind means a great deal to me, too. I love the people here, and I love Wilmore.”
Wilmore itself resembles many other towns across Kentucky, with a whopping two stoplights on the main drag, one bright-yellow Dollar General sign that cuts through the night sky like a beacon, three restaurants and seven churches. Yet, it’s also a unique town, where residents share a history and a sort of code that just doesn’t translate in other cities. Where else in Kentucky is there a glowing cross looming over the populace from atop the city-owned water tower? Granted, the water tower stands on the campus of Asbury University, a Christian school.
Clay’s Barber Shop is, in much the same way, both familiar and one-of-a-kind—half barbershop and half accidental museum. The walls are covered with memorabilia and curios from his 62 years there, each artifact feeling essential to the building’s structural integrity, as though straightening one piece might cause the whole block to crumble. There are no physical plaques, but each relic comes with a story from Tankersly, such as his 29 trucker hats hanging above the chairs.
“I’ve got over 800 hats at home,” Tankersly said, “over 800 that people have given me over the years. I might have bought two or three of them.” Of course, he never wears them to work, instead showing off a meticulously coiffed head of white hair. There’s an old adage that warns us to never trust a skinny cook and, similarly, never trust a barber in a ball cap.
Almost hidden on a top shelf are two sets of pre-electric hair clippers, each with two parallel blades but no cables. Instead, the clippers each have a rod with a finger grip, and a barber would squeeze his hand quickly to make the blades slide and slice. “I would say that back then, barbers had a pretty good hand grip,” Tankersly mused.
In the back corner, there are six photos of Tankersly and his friends with University of Kentucky men’s basketball coach John Calipari at R.J. Corman’s airstrip in Wilmore. “R.J. Corman was the cause of that,” Tankersly said. Right in the center of the photos is a framed commendation naming Tankersly a Kentucky Colonel. “[R.J.] was the cause of that, too,” he said of the late railroad executive.
Two fishbowl-shaped gumball machines sit half-full in the waiting area. One of them, a rare survivor of inflation, dispenses a gumball for a penny. “It was here when I first came,” Tankersly said. “All the kids really love it.”
Patrons, too, are a part of the museum experience of Clay’s Barber Shop. Most are old friends of Tankersly, and their conversations often start in November 1956, slowly mapping the history of the universe from there. On one morning recently, a customer mapped the town’s headlines over the past half-century, while lamenting his upcoming 60th birthday.
Tankersly, who is normally chipper, aired a grievance of his own: the confounding diagnosis of his son’s injured hand.
“We thought it was from years ago,” he said, describing what happened to his son. “We had two quarter horses, and he had one foot in the stirrup, and he had his hand on the saddle horn. And just as he was ready to throw that other leg over, it reared up and went over sideways, and that saddle horn crunched the middle of his hand.
“But the doctor said, ‘No, that’s not what it is. It’s hereditary.’ They looked at my hands; they looked at my wife’s hands. Our hands are fine.”
Tankersly’s skepticism is well-founded. His hands are good, great—marvelous even. His hands still move like they did in ’56. They move without the rust of 62 years. Any faulty DNA surely would have been exposed in mangled haircuts, as the disheveled scalps of gentlemen across Wilmore bore the burden. No, Tankersly’s hands work miracles. They can sculpt and craft on whatever canvas might walk through his door. Sixty-two years of artistry are apparent in every haircut.
“I’ve been pretty blessed all my life with pretty good health and everything, so I think every day He takes pretty good care of me,” Tankersly said, giving all credit to God.
Only once did Tankersly consider chasing a different life. A year after he started working in the barbershop, a group of his friends from high school moved to New York to work for IBM, chasing the new American dream long before Silicon Valley took tech to the West Coast. Even then, Tankersly felt the special tug of Wilmore anchoring him to his home.
“Not all of them, but the biggest majority of them hated every minute of it,” Tankersly said, “but they couldn’t quit. The benefits were too good. Now, I ain’t got any benefits at all, but I love my job. You know, money isn’t everything, son.”
During his six-plus decades as a barber, he has seen 11 presidencies. America finished wars in Korea and Vietnam, and started them in Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s watched his town and his nation change through the windows of his Main Street store, the same one he first entered at 18.
Every day, Tankersly comes in by 8 a.m., flips the sign that tells the world, “Come in, we’re open!” and cuts hair for nine hours.
Some days, he takes care of whole families in one sitting. One family sent five generations of men through Clay’s Barber Shop.
In the late afternoon, he turns the bolt, shuts down the lights, and heads out the back to make it home for dinner. Days roll into years. Friends come and go. Brandenburg, who helped Tankersly start barbering in 1956, passed away this past year. And Corman, the man behind the signed U.K. gear and one of Tankersly’s dearest friends? Tankersly gave him his first haircut as a baby and his last before he diedin 2013.
Come in by 8 a.m. Cut hair. Lock the door. Go home. Come in by 8 a.m. Cut hair. Lock the door. Tankersly has spent more than 22,700 days in his barbering career. How many of us could dedicate a decade to one job, then another decade, and then four more? How much love is required to stand behind the same door every day and not chase a far-flung green light?
What kind of American dream allows for prioritizing your happiness over your success?
Clay Tankersly’s American dream does.
After all this time, he still has no plans to retire. He sounds almost indebted to Wilmore, as if the town has given him so many gifts that he can’t help but pay it back with his time and talents.
“As long as I feel like it, I’m going to keep on working,” he said. “I would miss not coming down here, talking to my friends and things. I would miss it.”
At this point, Tankersly is as much a part of the town as the town is a part of him. The two are almost indistinguishable in character; Wilmore’s longtime barber has become the gatekeeper of its soul. He is indispensable in his corner of the world.
“A lot of times, we get compared to Mayberry, but I love it,” Tankersly said. “I love the people here.”
That American dream might be the most satisfying of all.