20 Years of Cuts and Cut-Ups

New customers come into Bill’s Barber Shop in Brooklyn Park all the time, looking for Bill.

What they find is a surprise—Bill’s wife, Natalie Berry, is the shop’s owner.

“They look at me, and I tell them I had a sex change,” she said with a laugh.

Then she’ll cut their hair and likely have gained more longtime clients. Many of her customers have been coming to the shop since the day she opened it, March 1, 1991, with her husband, Bill Berry.

After his death 15 years ago, Natalie Berry said she never had any thoughts of changing the name or anything else in the shop on Church Street. Everything is the same as it was the day the couple opened it, from the wood-paneled walls covered with Baltimore sports memorabilia and photos, to the two chairs still in the shop. Bill’s name in stickers is even posted to one of the mirrors.

“That was his name, and I kept it up,” she said of her decision not to change anything.

That decision is just fine with her customers, many of whom have been coming for haircuts and shaves since it opened. They say they enjoy the camaraderie they enjoy with Berry, and they frequently tease each other.

“I’ve been coming here for 20 years. It was years and years ago. Before that, it was George’s. I’ve always come here. Her husband, Bill, used to cut my hair, and he wouldn’t let her cut it,” Brooklyn Park resident Franklin Evans Sr. said with a wink.

Now, Berry cuts the hair of everyone in the Evans family, including his wife, his son and grandchildren.

“I don’t have to tell her how to cut it. She knows how to cut it,” Evans said.

Berry said she knows how to cut hair from her days as a hair dresser years ago. She met her husband of 19 years in barber school. Not long after their marriage, they bought a Ferndale barber shop and renamed it the Ferndale Barber Shop and Hair Salon.

The Berrys sold the shop and moved to the Eastern Shore, but returned a few years later because of illnesses in the family. Driving down Church Street, they saw George’s Barber Shop was for sale, so they bought it and renamed it Bill’s.

Natalie Berry still has her first ad from the Pennysaver advertising haircuts for $4.50. Cuts for seniors were $4, and cuts with a blow dry and styling were $5.50. The shop took in $35 that day, she recalled.

When Bill Berry died, his wife decided to keep everything as it was, saying being in the shop was a comfort in her grief.

At one point, her son, Bill Berry II, followed his parents into the business. He died five years ago at the age of 27.

“I buried my husband on a Saturday and came in here on Monday. This is a comfort zone,” she said. “My customers are just great. They’re all Brooklyn Park people. Some come all the way from the Eastern Shore. They come in, and we talk about my husband. That’s good. I still have police officers come in and talk about my husband and talk about my son.

“We laugh in here and still tell jokes. I guess I’m one of the guys now,” she added.

One of those guys even helped Berry through a rough patch in the transition of losing her husband. He told her if she wanted to keep the shop open, she’d have to learn how to cut flat tops, a style her husband had done but she never had been able to master.

The customer let her practice on his hair for weeks, but she still had trouble. Then one day, she said she smelled her husband’s cologne. And after that, she could do the flat top style.

“It was like, he took my hand and guided me,” she recalled.

Berry said she now is a master barber. The difference between being a hair dresser and a master barber is “a hair dresser uses scissors and a barber uses clippers. I had to go to barber school to learn to be a barber. I couldn’t go into a shop and say, ‘I want to cut men’s hair.’ It’s a lot of clipper cutting,” she said.

Knowing how to do both has been essential to her business because, “I can do anything. Women’s hair, perms, color,” she said.

Berry has had to stay on top of the styles over the years and said many barbers can’t do one of the more recent popular cuts for men, the style made popular by teen singer Justin Bieber. Styles change every five years or so, but knowing how to cut them has helped maintain her business, she added.

The sole employee, Berry plans to run her shop for as long as she can. Her children, Danielle, Rob, and David, have pursued other careers, but she said that’s fine with her.

“I didn’t expect them to do what I did just because I did,” she said.

Berry said she would like the shop’s ownership to stay in the family, even if the children or one of her six grandchildren run it and hire barbers to operate it. Still, that’s years off for the 67-year-old.

“I’ll probably be here ‘til I’m 80. That’s my goal,” she said. “My goal is to be the oldest woman barber in the state of Maryland.”