LEFTY’S BARBERSHOP HAS been serving patrons for 60 years in the town of Cass. Barber Lyle “Lefty” Meeks says he has enjoyed his work at the shop due in large part to the friendly people he meets and the stories they tell. Having lived in Cass since it was a booming company town and through its transition to a bustling state park, Meeks has plenty of his own stories to tell.


In Cass, a small flyer hangs in a window stating some historical facts.

“In 1948, Harry Truman was President, milk was 85¢ a gallon, and “Lefty” Meeks was the barber in Cass,” it reads.

It goes on to note that 60 years later, only one of these statements is still true.

On May 10, the community, friends and family will gather at Lefty’s Barbershop to celebrate Meeks’ six decades of barbering.

Step inside the building where the flyer hangs and you might find Lyle Meeks, known to most as “Lefty,” snipping away at the hair of a customer and recalling stories of the old lumber town. On a slow afternoon, you may find him reclining in the barber’s chair, enjoying a book.

The barbershop in Cass has been an institution since the town was a booming lumber town of several thousand people, and it’s where, as a young man in the late 1940s, Meeks came to serve his apprenticeship under long-time barber Clyde “Butch” Wilmoth.

While the shop isn’t too far from his childhood home in Stony Bottom, life took Meeks on a winding path to get there. And the barber says he wouldn’t rather be any place else.

As a 20-something during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Meeks fell in with the Civilian Conservation Corps, performing road work and clearing fire trails first at the CCC camp on Black Mountain, and later at Thornwood.

“I liked it,” said Meeks. “I would have stayed longer if I could, but two years was as long as they’d let you stay at one time.”

“But it wasn’t long after that the war broke out, and that fixed it all,” Meeks continued. “It wasn’t long then before I was sent greetings by Uncle Sam.”

Meeks and three of his brothers were called to service during the Second World War.

For three and a half years, Meeks served in an anti-aircraft unit of the U.S. Army. During a two-year tour overseas, he saw action in England, France, Belgium and Germany.

“I’ve seen a lot of country over there,” he said. “Actually, Germany put me in the mind of West Virginia, with the hills and everything. It was really pretty.”

Following the war, Meeks returned to the West Virginia he missed, helping his father on the family farm at Stony Bottom. Not long after being home, Meeks and one of his brothers went to Akron, Ohio. He spent a year working at a chemical plant there, when another line of work came to mind.

“Then I thought well, maybe I’d like to take a shot at barbering,” Meeks said.

He tried to get into a barber school in Akron, but it was full. He was later accepted at a school in Wheeling.

During his first year out of the Wheeling program, the 28-year-old Meeks trained as an apprentice with Wilmoth at the barbershop in Cass. From there, Meeks went on to work in a shop in Durbin.

“About a year later, [Wilmoth] came up there and asked me if I wanted to come back,” Meeks recalled. “I said, ‘We’ll I’m getting it pretty well made up here now.’ He said, ‘There’s three of you up here, and there’d only be one of you down there. You’ll do better.’ So I came back, and I’ve been here ever since.”

“The town was booming then,” he continued. “The mill was running full blast, and all these houses were filled by workers. You didn’t fool around then, sitting around like you do now, because you was really busy.”

In those days, Meeks said he would open the shop around 8 a.m. Working straight through the day, often without a break to eat, Meeks said he was lucky if he got out by 11 that evening.

Lines of workers would form at the barbershop after the lumber mill’s five o’clock whistle. Customers also came from Green Bank, Arbovale, Dunmore, Back Mountain and Clover Lick.

People from the high-elevation town of Spruce, accessible only by rail, came into town on Friday nights.
“A lot of them stayed up there six months before they came back down,” said Meeks. “They had a pretty good stake, and they lived it up while they was here.”

Those were the days when customers could come to a barber for a shave, as well as a haircut, and Meeks said those from Spruce who sat in his chair bore the evidence of the harsh environment on top of the mountain.

“Some of them, their faces were so tough from that wind up there, and it would stay cold on that mountain,” he said. “Their face was like leather. You couldn’t hurt one of them if you cut his throat. It was like shaving barbed wire.”

But Meeks’ didn’t just give haircuts to grizzled lumberjacks. With many of the whitewashed company houses in Cass full of large families, Meeks has fond memories of the scores of children that played around town and came into his shop.

“At one time, I’d say there was close to 350 or 400 kids who went to school here,” said Meeks. “They played all around here a lot—the kids did. They were all very good to me. I never had no trouble with none of them. “

The barber said he could rely on children to run to the company store and fetch change for him when the shop was busy.

“I’d tell them to get themselves some ice cream or something for their troubles, but they’d always bring the right change back,” he said.

Playing ball near the barbershop, kids may have hit the building from time to time or broken a pane of glass, but Meeks said it never bothered him much. When apologetic youngsters came in to offer to pay for the glass, Meeks said he’d fix it, and the kids would ask him not to tell their dads.

Working as long as he has Meeks said he has seen many of those children grow up and have kids of their own who got their haircuts at his shop. Today, those children too, have grown up. Often, when they come back from Ohio, Pennsylvania or Maryland to visit their parents in Pocahontas County, they drop by the shop to say hello to Meeks or sit down for a haircut.

For many, Lefty’s Barbershop is a place full of memories. While the town of Cass has undergone a significant transformation from a busy company town to a state park, at Lefty’s, little has changed in the past 60 years.

“It’s an old-time shop—nothing fancy,” said Meeks. “It’s held up pretty well. When the state took it over, they told me not to change anything, just leave as it was.”

The building itself was originally the barracks of the CCC camp on Coal Run, between Snowshoe and Cass. The lumber company later bought the barracks building and moved it into town.

On the outside of the building, a striped pole and lettering on the window are the only adornment. Flourishes on the letters themselves have long faded, but the window still bears the hand-painted letters that let customers and passers-by know they’ve found Lefty’s Barbershop.

Inside the shop, Meeks still has the old porcelain and chrome chair. From one of the chair’s arms hang the leather strops Meeks used to hone his straight razor before he stopped giving shaves. Behind the chair is a wide mirror, a little bit of wooden cabinetry and a wall hung with knick-knacks and mementos his patrons have given him.

Across the room, are chairs for the patrons that came out of a silent movie theater once housed in Kane’s store, where, as a child, Lefty would pay a dime to watch cowboys and Indians flicker across the screen.

“As a kid, you wasn’t old enough to read the lettering, but with the shooting of the cowboys and Indians, you didn’t care whether you could read or not,” he said.

The bottoms of the seats have been replaced, due to the untold number of people who over the decades have taken a seat, waiting their turn in the barber’s chair.

The building still has its original pine floor, except for where it has been worn out and replaced two or three times from Meeks’ pacing as he cut his customers’ hair.

Resembling something from a Norman Rockwell painting and today nestled within Cass Scenic Railroad State Park, Lefty’s may be the most-photographed barbershop in West Virginia.

“If I had the money from the film that had been taken in this place, I wouldn’t have to barber,” joked Meeks.

But really, the 88-year-old, who still cuts hair every Wednesday through Saturday, said there is not much else he would rather be doing.

“To be honest about it, I like everything about it, or else I wouldn’t have been here so long,” said Meeks. “I liked the people; they was nice to me. And I really enjoyed my work. People you’ve never seen before, they’re real nice, and you enjoy talking to them. That’s what kept me going all these years.”

The celebration in honor of Lyle “Lefty” Meeks takes place May 10, from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. at the barbershop.





NESTLED AMONG THE picket fences and rows of company houses in Cass Scenic Railroad State Park, Lefty’s Barbershop may be the most-photographed barbershop in the state. The building itself was originally the barracks of a nearby CCC camp. D. Tanner, photo