78A Hundred Years of Haircuts
“100+ Years of History” by Vincent Thomas, 2023–2024 · portraits of the shop’s former barbers and beauticians on corrugated metal · commissioned by Jockey Club Barbershop owner Iva Smith during the shop’s restoration at 809 Elm Avenue · second phase painted September 2024 by six young artists aged 15–20 mentored by Thomas through his A Beautiful Message program, with leadership training from Grassroots Community DevelopmentMURAL
Six portraits with first names in cursive above them — and three of those names are the barbers who worked in Waco's first Black-owned barbershop.
It is painted straight onto corrugated metal siding, so every face is ribbed by the panels and interrupted by screw heads, and it does not matter in the slightest. On the blue half, six people: a woman with a natural in a mustard blouse, smiling right at you; an older man in a white open-collar shirt with glasses and a moustache; a man in brown; a man in red; a woman in white; a man in yellow. Above each one, in black cursive, a single name. Dolly. Ben. Cicero. Mayes. Sue. Dugas.
No surnames — and you do not need them, because Baylor's Waco History project supplies three of them. This is the Jockey Club Barbershop, the first Black-owned barbershop in Waco, and its long-serving barbers were Jesse Mayes, Lloyd Dugas and Cicero Martin. Three of the six faces on this wall are the three men who cut hair here for decades.
The brown half is the shop's interior, painted as though the wall were glass: the counter, the mirrors, a child sitting up in the chair for his first proper haircut. Along the front of the counter the stations are labelled — MILES. MR. C. NICK. HARRIS. Inside the painted shop, in a painted frame, SINCE 1916. Waco History dates the opening to 1920; the wall says 1916, and we are not going to argue with a barbershop about its own birthday.
It started on the old square across the river, named after a line of hair-care products, under Woodrow "Buster" Anderson; his nephew Benny Frank Smith ran it from 1944 until he died in 2004. It survived the 1953 tornado. It did not survive urban renewal — in 1970 the federal programme cleared some two hundred buildings from that district, and the Jockey Club was moved out here to Elm Avenue with $2,500 in compensation for the trouble. Jackie Robinson got his hair cut here. So did Baylor's Walter Abercrombie and Michael Johnson. It closed in 2011 when Lloyd Dugas — the last name on the blue wall — retired, and reopened in February 2016 under Iva Smith, Frank Smith's widow, with the original chairs still in it.
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