Longtime Moses Lake barber witnesses change

MOSES LAKE - "After you've been here long enough, about everywhere you go, you find people you know," Lorin Lybbert said.

He ought to know. Lybbert has lived in Moses Lake for 60 years.

Originally from Alberta, Canada, he attended high school at what is now Frontier Middle School, which sits across the street from his current shop, Lorin's Barber Shop, located at 518 W. Third Ave.

He went into barber school the fall of 1954 in order to use up his GI bill after serving in the Korean War and opened his first barbershop in the Knolls Vista area in 1956.

"Knolls Vista was the shopping center in town," he recalled. "There was a doctor, dentist, beauty shop, a hobby shop, my shop and first there was a fabric shop on the corner, then Casey Music moved in there. Next door to that was a bakery, grocery store, pharmacy and then a laundromat."

He was there for 16 years, and has been in his present location since 1972.

"I was here when that shooting took place across the street at the school," he said.

Lybbert recalled he first saw police cars pull up and started hearing things over the radio, which were not always correct.

"It was a cold day, quite a bit of snow," he remembered.

Lybbert said he "didn't get too much of a good idea" about some of the television reporters at the time, who would run "like a pack of wolves" at people who left flowers in the days following the tragedy.

They tried asking him what he'd heard, thought and knew.

"I didn't say too much," he said. "I just want to tell you how relieved I was when I saw two grandsons and a nephew walking across the street after all that turmoil. That really, really felt good."

But Lybbert's time in Moses Lake also includes farming irrigated hay on the ground where Wal-Mart is presently located.

"That was considered out in the country then," he said. "There's been a lot of changes."

In the same year, 1950, Lybbert raised sugar beets at what is currently the intersection between state Route 17 and Interstate 90.

"We broke that ground out of sage brush," he recalled.

Lybbert also remembered watching buildings being built on the hill where Samaritan Healthcare presently sits, which were going to be the new U.S. Bureau of Reclamation office. There was no hospital there at the time, he added.

"When I first started cutting hair, we could cut women's hair, but the beauticians could not cut men's hair," he recalled. "So they were going to change the law to eliminate licensing altogether. But the operators got a little excited about that, so they made it so that they'd have to get it through beauty school."

Now both genders' hair can be cut in a beauty shop.

Lybbert's favorite part of the job is meeting people. His least favorite part is that there's not a lot of time for vacations.

Outside of work, he likes to garden and do yard work.

"Try to stay out of jail," he said wryly. "People ask, 'When are you going to retire?' Well, why? I'm retired now. Semi. It's pretty good, if I want to take off, I can take off. You can come in here, meet these guys, kid away, they give you a bad time and you try to give them a bad time. They just become friends."

The shop is open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday with other people, but Lybbert mostly comes in on Fridays and Saturdays.

Janae Stockwell works in the barbershop alongside Lybbert.

"I've been here for eight years already, been with him forever," she said. "He's a great guy."

"He's one of the few that I feel does a good job with a flat top," customer Paul Roth said. "So I've been coming to him for 40 years."

"They're better than other people's," customer and fellow barber Jim Harrington said of Lybbert's haircuts, adding, "We learned to cut hair before they cut with numbers."

"I like the way he cuts my hair," customer Ed Wilkinson said. He's been coming in for several years, he estimated. "The atmosphere is very pleasant, the conversation is good. It's just a pleasant place to be."