Ron Caesar
Top Notch Barbershop
Interview captured in 2018
Meet Ron
Ron Caesar was one of the first barbers I met when I moved to Houston. I lived on the north side of Harris county in a neighborhood called Westador, which was just outside of Spring, TX. I rarely see Ron at all since I moved closer to the center of Houston, but we continue to share a special connection. Ron was my barber for all four years of my high school career, seeing me transition from adolescence to adulthood. I still remember the day when he told me that he would give me the best cut of my life, and that day was the morning before my senior prom. A man of respectable wisdom, and an unquestionable sense of responsibility, Ron prioritizes consistency and professionalism.
It’s been almost four years since I’ve sat in his chair, but Ron continues to send out group texts to all his customers, informing them about his availability. I can’t recall a time when Ron has not showed up to his shop without communicating with his customers beforehand. He is the owner of Top Notch Barber Shop, which only consists of Ron and his co-barber. The success of his business heavily depends on his physical presence. It was easy to score an interview with Ron because of the depth of our relationship. Chatting with Ron for the first time since I was eighteen years old was a surreal experience, and I admittedly wanted him to be proud of the young man I grew up to be at age twenty-two. Before our interview, Ron revealed to me that he grew up on the southside of Houston in both South Park and Third Ward. Even though his shop is located in Spring, he’s a product of the Third Ward community.
"People always say that “a
woman can’t raise a man.” Yes, they can! My mother raised me, and I didn’t have my
father at all. I will never take credit from any mother who is in their child’s life."
Betty's book exclusive
The Barber Who Skated Through Adversity
It’s a pleasure to finally speak with you again! I’m doing my project on Houston’s Third Ward, and I had no idea you grew up in that area of town.Yep. I grew up on the southside of Houston, around South Park and Third Ward.So, let’s get started. Could share with me your journey to becoming a barber?
I grew up cutting hair, cutting my own hair and my brother’s hair. It was something I always enjoyed. But I never told myself that I would become a barber. At a young age, I never thought that I would eventually own a barbershop.I ran and managed restaurants for almost thirty years. But when I decided to start my own business, the barbershop is what I wanted to do. My experience with restaurants helped me to be good with people. I felt that starting a barbershop wouldenable me to touch a lot of people.
The experiences we share here, we laugh and joke in addition to very serious topical debates. We talk about sports, child support, politics, and everything in between. And it’s great that we have a mixture of old and young. It’s an amazing vehicle to reach and influence a lot of people.
I never cut hair in someone else’s shop. I’ve always owned my own barbershop. My plan was finish barber college and start looking for a store front. I actually found this shop while finishing up my barber’s license. They call it the black man’s country club. It really is! When I decided to start my own business, I wanted it to be a place where people felt safe and respected. I wanted people to actually enjoy coming here, and not just forthe haircuts, but for the atmosphere and fun. It’s been a great journey.
That’s an interesting transition. You a restaurant manager to running a barbershop. Could you give me some more details on that personal transformation?
My first job was at McDonald’s hamburgers at sixteen and became a manager at seventeen. At the time I was on my own. I lost my mother at thirteen years old. So, when I joined the restaurant industry, I was working part-time and in the process of graduating high school. I will admit, this was challenging. But from age thirteen to eighteen, my mindset was, “okay, how am I going to survive?”
I grew up seeing my mother work hard, and so I concluded that I couldn’t fail if I decided to follow her example. At the time, I worked forRon McMillian, who owned several McDonald’s franchises in Houston. After graduation, he approached me about pursuing an opportunity in Las Vegas. His family bought several restaurants in Las Vegas, and he asked if I would be interested in relocating there. So basically, they became my family. They were a white family, but they looked after me like I was one of their own.
After ten years of being a store manager at McDonald’s, I switched to the hotel and restaurant industry. My experience in management moved me up very quickly in the hospitality service. Working as a manager at various hotels in Vegas led me to eventually coming back to Houston to be a general manager at CiCi’s Pizza for thirteen more years.
So, what influenced you to become a barber and own your own shop at the beginning of your career in the hair industry? That sounds difficult considering that. you’ve never worked in a shop before.
When I finally began to seriously consider starting my own business, I asked God what to do. It was actually him who told me to start a barbershop. So, I started barber college while still working as a general manager for CiCi’s Pizza. I worked five days per week from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm and spent my Saturdays at the barber college in Acres Homes. I chose this particular barber college because they worked with my schedule. Really, I had no off days.
Your mother died while you were still very young. Somehow you stayed motivated despite that tragedy. You also took a chance with Mr. McMillian, and you allowed him to mentor you as a young man. What role does mentorship and families play in your barbershop?
We have a lot of single mothers who come here, and they always commend us on how well we mentor their children. One value that we emphasize at my shop is the tremendous job that single mothers do with raising their children alone. In general, single mothers in our community aren’t appreciated enough.
People always say that “a woman can’t raise a man.” Yes, they can! My mother raised me, and I didn’t have my father at all. I will never take credit from any mother who is in their child’s life. The thing that I enjoy most about being a mentor is watching boys grow up to becoming men. We’ve watched kids graduate, go to prom, earn degrees, and start careers. We’ve even watched you grow up, Chris!
Ron didn’t believe in excuses. He asserted that any dream can be accomplished. with hard work. Losing his mother at an early age did not diminish his drive, but it gave him a chip on his shoulders that he still carries today. Therefore, its concepts of mentorship and fatherhood that drive the Black institutional aspect of his business. There’s a reason why Ron is one of the busiest barbers in the city of Houston. Because he’s father, his children are a major motivating factor to him by default. Fatherhood and mentorship are common themes discussed in Ron’s barbershop.
It was rare for me to visit Top Notch Barbershop without my own father, and rarer to see Ron or his colleague without their children accompanying them. Seeing barbers’ children roam around Black shops is not an uncommon theme. The flexibility afforded to barbers allows them to pick their children up from school. I know many barbers who’s daily routine consists of scooping up their children from school every weekday.
Barber babies are practically raised in the barbershop. They are not only reared by their own fathers, but by the multiple mentors that surround them. Black barbers serve as mentors to their own children in addition to the children of their customers. Asmentioned by Ron, single mothers bring their children to barbershops to surround them with positive Black male mentor.
Saturday mornings are commonly where you’ll see an abundance of single mothers and their children. Weekends are often the most availabletime for single mothers to take their boys to get haircuts. This routine is usually repeated at the same frequency in which adult Black males receive their haircuts; every two weeks, and sometimes every three weeks depending on personal finances.
Relationships are what drive Ron’s barbershop. It’s almost incorrect to label him as a barber alone. In addition to barbering, Ron’s social capital has propelled him to become a shrewd entrepreneur. Ron doesn’t have a four-year university degree, yet his speech reflects that of a senior director of a Fortune 500 company. Professionalism plays a big role in Ron’s rapport with customers, but his extracurricular activities led him to a unique outlet to develop his business. His second business allows him to pursue his two favorite passions while making money at both.
You’re not only a barber, but a business entrepreneur who puts on roller-skating events to network with other local business owners, and namely, Black business owners. Could you tell me about your organization?
I grew up roller skating as a kid. Going to the roller rink was my biggest motivation to finish my chores around the house. As long as my chores were done, and my grades were good, my mother would let us go skating every Friday night. So, I skatedmy whole life, and I still skate today. I went to my first Skate-a-thon in Atlanta in 2009, never previously knowing that this type of event existed. It was a national skating convention which invited business owners and skate enthusiasts from around theworld. I was blown away! I never seen anything like it.
I wanted to bring an event like this to Houston! Dallas had one, but Houston never had anything like what I saw in Atlanta. So, I funded an organization, The Houston Rolling Committee. Our first goalwas to put together a national skate party. This event wouldn’t just be local, or regional, but an open event to skaters from across U.S.
We started networking to hotels, airlines, and multiple potential venues. We strategically picked the third week in February so that it wouldn’t compete with any national holidays, or the Livestock and Rodeo event. This most unique thing about this skate party is that we skate in the middle of the night between 12:00 am and 5:00 am.
The reason we skate this late because one, not many people need to be at work. Two, we’re not competing against most normal business hours. And three, it’s a private event that doesn’t bother anyone. This is a no sleep weekend, especially for my organization which puts it on every year.
Over the past nine years, we’ve built good relationships with multiple businesses, the venues, and the attendees. It is a second business venture for me, but oddly, I started my barbershop business at the same time I helped create The Houston Rolling Committee. I can truly say that I am doing two things in my life that I love, which is roller skating and cutting hair.
Ron transitioned from restaurant manager to barber, but he’s always been a roller-skater. From the tone in his voice, I could tell that roller skating was more than just a secondary business venture. Ron organizes roller skating consortium to sponsor. networking opportunities for local business owners, but that’s not his only motivation for putting on these events. What was most profound about Ron’s passion for roller skating is how it relates to his relationship with his mother.
As mentioned in the interview, Ron’s mother rewarded his completion of chores and good grades with trips to the roller rink. Furthermore, Ron’s value for hard work originated from his upbringing. Even though roller skating is Ron’s favorite hobby, the “work hard play hard” mentality does not necessarily describe him in this context. The best way to describe Ron is a businessman who has inseparably linked his work to his play. Through his roller skating organization and his barbershop, Ron has achieved a reality that most working adults strive for yet rarely achieve in their lifetime.
Any barber will agree that their job depends on their ability engage in discussion. Social capital and human interaction are inexhaustible resources that Black barbershops provide for their communities. In many ways, Black barbershops have transcended the barriers that technology has placed on the quality of interpersonal communication. For example, large tech companies like Amazon have made it possible for us to receive services without interacting with any other people.
Traditional brick and mortar stores are still frequented by Americans today, but we can practically order groceries online without ever speaking with a store clerk. This same rule applies to restaurants, transpiration services , or almost any commercial activity. However, technology has yet to invent a mobile app that cuts your hair for you. Of course, it isn’t impossible for customers to schedule a home visit appointment with their barbers, but most clients would rather show up to a shop and pay fifteen dollars for a walk-in haircut instead of one-hundred plus dollars for a home visit. In a world where human interaction is diluted and dominated by social media and technology, Black barbershops continue to serve as spaces where social capital is prioritized.
Any person who enters a Black barbershop must make their presence known. If you’re a new customer, the ownerwill most likely greet you first, even if they’re working on someone’s hair. Sometimes, even new customers are also responsible for initiating communication with whichever barber they would like to receive a haircut from. Once a that newcomer sits in the chair, they must communicate the hairstyle they’d want to their barber. Good barbers are trained to manage their customers’ expectations. Quite rarely will you see barbers proceed to cut their client’s hair without an idea of what style their client would prefer. I used to show pictures of famous celebrities to my personal barber to give him an idea of the type of haircut I wanted. After addressing all service related items with the barber, customers are presented the choice to either engage or refrain from the flow of conversations in the barbershop.
Ron’s shop is undersized compared to the other shops I examined during this study. On busy days at Top Notch Barbershop, personal space becomes a luxury commodity and customers are sometimes sitting knee to knee patiently waiting on their turn. However, this small shop serves to the advantage of social capital because conversations are much more streamlined and interactive. Ron mostly serves as the moderator, but like most barbers he’s unopposed to challenging and debating his customers in healthy discourse.
Are debates and discussions important to your business?
Yea we debate, but that’s the fun of it. We have conversations about everything here, whether it’s topics on the presidential election, waking up to see police brutality on the news, racism, sports etc. It’s pretty amazing to see the different ideas and beliefs that people have about these topics here, but it’s their right. No matter how we react, or what we may think about what someone else says here, it’s their fundamental right to express how they feel about certain things. That cannot be taken away from them.
This is a Black barbershop, so I’m sure controversial topics regarding our own community are discussed.
The most beautiful thing that I see from our discourses is the compassion that people have for each other, especially regarding issues of police brutality. What I also love about these debates is that they are never one sided. When we talk about these issues, we’re not just blaming police. In my opinion, all police officers are not bad. I think it’s good we have these conversations.
How are you able to engage the older and younger crowd here?
I often feel like there aren’t many spaces where generations x thru z are able to debate. One of the most interesting debates we’ve had were ones between the older and younger clients here. Do you remember the event where a group of boys filmed a man drowning and did nothing to help him? And they posted it on social media? Well the older cats here expressed how they believed it was immoral for those boys to do that, while the younger generation of clients had a different perspective. “They didn’t do nothing! They didn’t tell the man to put himself in harm’s way, so why should these kids be charged?” they said. It was the neatest debate ever because it was along moral lines. We have a lot of conversations likethat, and importantly, they help the older and younger generations to understand each other.
Historically, Black men confided in barbershops as trustworthy institutions. In Cutting Along the Colored Line, Quincy T. Mills describes the 20th century as the “rise of the Negro barber”. The African American community responded to false freedoms of the Jim Crow era through socializing in semi-public spaces. During the 1940s, Black men were experiencing a time of widespread nationalistic betrayal after World War II. While thousands of Black men fought under ingrained ideals of freedom and democracy in Europe and South East Asia, the harsh realities of Jim Crow America held precedence over their lives when they returned. There weren’t many spaces outside of the hoe where Black men could voice their frustrations about their country. Mills writes that “the modern Black barber shop joined Black churches and beauty shops, and the Black press to anchor the public sphere in the twentieth century.” He alsoquotes historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. “Separate and independent of the state and also the market economy, the public sphere operated as a realm where all citizens interacted in reasoned discourse, even in criticism of governmental authority.
Roncarries on the tradition of free speech within his business. His shopsponsorsa space where older and younger generations of Black men can collide, debate, and compromise. Ron bridges parental gap for young men who need positive Black mentors. Top Notch Barber Shop is a Black Institution created by a man who spent most of his life without the guidance of his biological parents. However, Ron uses this tragic experience to increase the quality of life of Black people through business development, mentorship, and social capital. Ron is truly a man without excuses. Despite the emotional and spiritual battles that any person must experience with the loss of a loved one, he ties up his skates and lives up to be the man his mother would be proud of.
©BARBER TALK
NARRATIVES FROM THE BLACK BARBERS OF HOUSTON’S THIRD WARD and 1 Other Unpublished Work
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