Beards seem to be a sign of the times

By Carl Heintze

Pinned to the wall of my office is a picture of my grandfather and his five brothers.

I'm not sure when the picture was taken-sometime in the latter half of the 19th century, I think. The picture looks like the one that used to be on the Smith Brothers cough drops package--dark suits, no smiles and lots of beards and moustaches.

Looking at it the other day, it occurred to me that only once in my life have I attempted a beard and a moustache and it was a long time ago. At the conclusion of a backpacking trip when I hadn't shaved for at least a week I had the beginnings of facial hair.

So I let nature take its course--for awhile. It itched, it got gray on the hair ends and it made me look--so I thought, anyway--like a chubby Abraham Lincoln. That is to say, most of the hair growth was under my chin, where you couldn't see it. The moustache started up, faltered, but kept going valiantly.

So I began shaving off the beard, but retained the moustache. This made me appear to be Gordo, the Mexican comic strip character. So I shaved the moustache off, too. Ever since, I've had a hairless face.

And so do I think have a majority of American men. But facial hair seems to come and go. Or wax and wane. But it's never been as abundant as it was in my grandfather's time.

Along with long hair, facial hair was popular in the 1960s. Like around the time of the hippies and protests against almost everything conventional.

Before that, in the '40s and '50s, the butch cut and a hairless face were in vogue, perhaps a holdover from the military days of World War II and the Korean War. Not only did men not wear beards much, they cut their hair in what was called a "flat top," short and as level as a billiard table on top.

Since the '60s it seems to me beards and moustaches have come and gone, but with no regularity and for no apparent reason except, of course, male vanity.

Some men look good, even natural, with beards, as if that was what God intended. Others, like me, just look foolish.

But there doesn't seem to be any current trend toward or away from the moustache and the beard.

I got to thinking about all this because I watched the recent PBS program by Ken Burns about Mark Twain. Twain had a moustache most of his life, a kind of scraggly, unkempt, but yet distinctive layer of hair underneath his nose. He wouldn't have looked right without it. He acquired it early in life and never shaved it off.

On him it just looked right.

Beards and moustaches in his day and in my grandfather's time were a matter of comfort as well as style. Most men, if they shaved, shaved with a straight razor, no mean feat.

My grandfather used to do that, and as he got older, his hand got less sure. I suppose that was one reason why he grew a beard. So, more or less, did Ernest Hemingway. He said he grew a beard because his skin was very tender and shaving irritated it.

I always thought he had more reasons than that. His manhood was continually threatened, so some critics contend, and my theory was he grew a beard to prove he was a man's man when maybe he was just sort of a man.

I also had someone tell me once that beards turned women on. (Of course, he had a beard and he was going through what I would classify as the male menopause.)

I knew nothing much about his women, if any, so I can't tell if this is a fact or not. And since I never had a beard worth mentioning, I have no empirical evidence of my own to contribute. I really don't know how women feel about beards--and a good many other things.

In general, though I'd say that beards and moustaches are more trouble than they are worth--although I don't expect beard wearers to agree with that. True, you don't have to shave every day, and that's some kind of a blessing.

But having a beard makes it harder to get your face clean. It makes a hot day hotter. And it doesn't make up for being bald. Yet oddly enough a lot of bald men grow beards. Why hair will grow on your face but not on your head is a mystery that scientists and I have yet to solve.

In my own case, I think the ratio between hair on the top of my head and that which might grow on my face if I let it is about equal. That's principally because of the years the hair on my head has grown ever more sparse while that on my face appears to have stayed about the same.

I have to confess I don't know that for certain though. The only way I could find out would be to attempt a beard again, and the research just isn't worth the price.

So hairless, ever more hairless I live on, the mystery of my beard, at least, unresolved.

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Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times. A collection of his essays can be found at http://www.doitright.com/Carl/essays. He can be reached by email at feodorh@juno.com.

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