It’s 4 a.m. in Chattanooga, and Alton Park Boulevard is asleep.
Unlike other city streets, it appears to be sleeping with one eye open.
Just past the crumbling concrete train trestle that welcomes drivers to Alton Park, a red GMC pickup truck with Georgia Bulldog-themed license plates is parked outside a small brick building. Despite the early hour, its glass front door glows warmly with light from inside.
Above the entrance hangs a white sign trimmed in black, with “BEAR’S Barber Shop” spelled out in bold red letters.
At 78, Larry “Bear” High remembers how things used to be done, and he still does them that way – opening before dawn because that’s when his customers need him.
“You’d be surprised,” he says. “When I open this early, people will be outside waiting. They want to get their hair cut so they can get to work on time.”
As if to verify High’s story, his first customer of the day soon arrives.
4:25 a.m.
A man named Randall opens the door, walks in and exchanges a brief greeting with High. He then crosses the length of the room and settles into a red, cracked-leather barber chair, a relic of the ‘50s that High purchased from the barber school he attended in Nashville.
High grabs a red barber’s cape with a Bulldogs logo and slings it around Randall’s right side, letting it settle into place.
Going around the customer, rather than draping the cape over him, is a small but important detail, High says.
“Most barbers do it like this,” he says, lifting the cape again and swinging it over Randall’s head. “But that’s wrong. You don’t go over someone; you go around them.”
Without another word, High switches on his clippers and begins shaving Randall’s hair close to the scalp just above his ear. At his height, High towers over the chair, while his long arms allow him to work without stooping.
“I’m about 6-foot-5 now,” High says. “I used to be about 6-foot-7. When you get old, you shrink.”
Randall never told High what he wanted; he didn’t need to. The years have done away with the need for that conversation between these two men.
“Bear has been cutting my hair since I was a little boy,” says Randall, 69, his head as still as a mannequin’s.
“I first started to cut hair when I was 12 years old,” High adds. “We lived in the housing projects. I have some of those customers still to this day. I’ve been cutting their hair for 66 years.”
“He used to cut on his front porch,” Randall offers.
“That’s right,” Bear says. “When I was 13 or 14, I was charging 25 cents a head. When I turned 15 years old, I went up to 50 cents.”
While High doesn’t bleed his customers with sky-high prices, his shop is nevertheless awash in red. Even the checkerboard floor alternates between red and white, another clue that High is a Bulldog fan – and that he doesn’t hide his passion from Vols devotees.
But much of the red in the room predates High’s fandom.
“I became a fan a couple years ago when my grandson went to Georgia,” he says, pointing to his grandson’s roster photo, propped atop a metal filing cabinet to his right.
While High is on the topic of family sports celebrities, he gestures toward a man in a black-and-white photo of a Chattanooga minor league baseball team. Nearly the size of a small billboard, the photo leans against a vending machine behind his barber chair.
“That’s my daddy,” he says. “He was a great baseball player.”
High’s admiration for his father remains evident nearly 70 years after he stopped gathering memories of him.
“He died when I was 10, and then we moved to Alton Park,” he recalls.
The memory lingers only briefly before High turns the conversation back to sports.
“Now, do you know who the greatest baseball player of all time is?” he asks. “Willie Mays.”
At that, Mac enters the shop.
5:13 a.m.
As Mac walks toward a row of lobby chairs along the wall to High’s right, he passes several signs taped to the opposite wall conveying both the barber’s approach to life and his code of conduct for the shop.
Spotting one that declares, “Jesus is the answer,” Mac explains, “Bear puts the Lord first.”
Whether or not that makes a believer out of High’s customers, they’d still better heed the other signs, which forbid cursing and wearing shorts with the waistband below the hips.
“No butts / No sagging,” orders the latter sign.
“I don’t like all that crazy stuff,” Bear says.
After High catches Mac up on the morning’s conversation, Mac reveals another piece of Bear lore.
“My brothers and I would come to Bear to get our hair cut, even when our parents couldn’t pay,” he says. “He’d cut our hair anyway. He did that for hundreds of kids who couldn’t afford a haircut.”
Mac’s story sends High back to when he first picked up a pair of clippers. They belonged to his older brother, and using them without being discovered required a bit of subterfuge that usually failed.
“My oldest brother started cutting hair before me,” he remembers. “Every time he left the house, I’d sneak into his room and grab his clippers. I’d try to put them back just right, but he could always tell I’d messed with them. He’d get mad at me.”
High acquired his own clippers as a young teen and had already put a couple years of mileage on them by the time he entered The Howard School. By the time he arrived at Howard, he was certain cutting hair would be his life’s work, he says.
There was just one problem:
He had a bad left leg.
Knowing both his love of barbering and the obstacle he faced, High’s teachers sent him to vocational rehabilitation. A doctor there recommended he choose a profession that would allow him to spend his workdays sitting down.
High adamantly refused.
“I was angry,” he says. “I told my teachers, ‘I don’t care what the doctor said.’”
High leaves Mac waiting for a moment while he retrieves his senior yearbook from the filing cabinet. He flips to a page of student portraits accompanied by the professions they hoped to pursue and points a long finger at his photo.
Under it is the word “Barber.”
“I have always wanted to be a barber,” he says. “I have never wanted to be anything else.”
No sooner does High say this than he recalls the one thing he nearly allowed to derail his ambition: his love for a young woman named Verna.
Chattanooga had no barber school at the time, leaving High to attend one in Nashville. But he didn’t want to leave Verna behind, so he told her he’d stay in Chattanooga and find a job instead.
“She said, ‘No. I’m not going anywhere. You need to go to Nashville,’” High remembers. “If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here today. I would have lived a much different life. I thank God I listened to her.”
7:06 a.m.
Had High been a teacher, a coach, a preacher, a salesman or something else entirely, Terry would not now be walking into his barber shop while people across the city are still hitting the snooze button.
But High listened to Verna, who eventually became his first wife.
Decades later, Terry settles into one of the lobby chairs and strikes up a meandering conversation with High that touches on sports, the original route of Highway 58, community beautification and whatever else comes to mind.
The subjects seem almost beside the point. What matters is the opportunity to reminisce, share an opinion or fill the room with warm, idle chatter.
The easy exchange suggests the two men have known each other for decades. Terry soon makes clear how deep those roots run.
“I came here to get my hair cut, then my son came here, and now my grandson comes here,” Terry says. “That’s three generations. But I know families where Bear has cut the hair of four or five generations.”
Terry is just as clear about what first brought him and his family to Bear’s shop – and what keeps bringing them back.
“He’s our neighborhood barber,” he says. “Back then, you grew up with the neighborhood barber.”
“There are a lot of children I gave their first haircut,” High adds. “Some of them sitting in these chairs now are granddaddies.”
“Larry’s a true barber,” Terry says. “It’s buried in his soul. When he wakes up in the morning, he doesn’t think about anything but barbering. It isn’t something he does just for money. He’s committed to it.”
High was so committed to barbering that he often went without food while attending Tennessee Barber College in Nashville.
“I started saving my money. I’d be walking around Nashville hungry with hundreds of dollars in my pocket. I didn’t want to spend that money because I wanted to open my own shop one day. I saved every quarter.”
After graduating from Tennessee Barber College, High returned to Chattanooga and took his first professional job at Live and Let Live Barbershop on what is now Martin Luther King Boulevard. High remembers it as the city’s oldest Black barbershop.
He stayed three years before returning to Alton Park in March 1970 and renting a small structure beside the building that would eventually become his own. Rent was $40 a month, and High remained there for 18 years before moving his shop.
By then, the hundreds of dollars High had once carried around Nashville on an empty stomach had served their purpose. With $700 to his name, he bought the building.
The place had lived a very different life before Bear’s Barber Shop. High remembers it as a fashionable nightclub where patrons weren’t allowed through the door unless they were wearing a suit.
“When I got it, I turned it into a barbershop,” he says.
8:06 a.m.
High’s customers measure his longevity in haircuts given to generations of families. His experiences beyond the walls of his shop measure it in the changes he’s witnessed across Chattanooga.
He remembers, for example, a time when there were places in Chattanooga where he and his brothers couldn’t go and things they weren’t allowed to do.
“Before we’d go to town, Mama would tell us to use the restroom,” High remembers. “There was one restaurant that would let us in, but we couldn’t use the restroom and we couldn’t sit down. We had to go to the front counter, get our food and leave.”
Years later, High was a gubernatorial appointee to the state barber board, looking out the window of a Nashville hotel when he saw a bus traveling down a street named for Rosa Parks.
“It was one of the most amazing things I ever saw,” he says.
Through all the changes High has witnessed, one belief about people has remained constant, he says.
“There are good white people and bad white people. There are good Black people and bad Black people. The same kind of people come in every color. So I love all people.
“The Bible says to love one another. And that’s what I do.”
8:24 a.m.
As the city finally shakes off the night, takes a full breath of the new day and makes its way to work, High approaches what for many would mark the halfway point of a full shift.
But he shows no signs of tiring, nor does he slow his pace as the steady stream of customers into his shop continues.
It’s a display of vitality and commitment from a man whose contemporaries have, on the whole, left their working years behind.
It comes as no surprise, then, that High has no plans to retire.
“There are four things that will kill a man, and they all start with R: retirement, recliner, remote control and refrigerator,” High says. “That would kill me. That’s what killed my oldest brother. He retired, went in his house and never came out. I don’t want any part of that.”
High doesn’t dwell much on his legacy, either. He does plan to leave the building to his children, neither of whom is a barber. He has a son and a daughter, having lost his oldest daughter in a fire. But beyond providing for his family, he doesn’t concern himself with how he’ll be remembered.
“I ain’t worried about that,” he says. “The Bible says to leave your children an inheritance. And whatever God says, that’s what I try to do.”
High would rather spend his time continuing his life’s work – and scouring local thrift stores with his third wife, Mildred, whom he married three years ago.
“I love going to thrift stores. That’s my hobby. I love it, I love it,” he says. “That’s been in me since I was a boy. My grandmother would take me to rummage sales, and I’d go to the toy box and get a little toy.”
High might not concern himself with his legacy, but others are determined to make sure Alton Park remembers it.
Terry, still occupying the chair he chose when he entered the shop, points to a banner he had made to mark High’s more than 50 years of service to the community.
“Bear is the legend of Alton Park. He needs to be recognized,” Terry says. “And I didn’t want to wait until he was lying in a casket. I wanted to honor him now.
“If you’re going to give someone roses, do it now. Let them smell the aroma. Don’t wait until they’re dead and can’t smell them.”
In the years since High opened his first shop in Alton Park, the Vietnam War ended, the Berlin Wall fell and the U.S. elected its first Black president.
Chattanooga changed, too. Businesses opened and closed, neighborhoods evolved and generations grew old.
Through it all, High kept cutting hair. And tomorrow morning, while the rest of the city is still sleeping, the warm light glowing from his shop will tell passersby and customers alike that he’s still at it.