LOW PROFILE Velcome, Mein Hair

THE CAPTION UNDER THE PHOTO OF Inge Bentjen giving Times Herald reporter Lonnie Hudkins a haircut: Reporter Gets Clipped. The headline: A LADY’S TRADE-GERMAN, VS. MALES ALIKE TO BARBER. And Hud-kins’s lead: “Go out and get clipped by a woman,” said the city editor to the reporter.

AARGH.

The Good Journalism Police may fire when ready, but before the Political Correctness Patrol reads Hudkins the riot act, two things need to be mentioned here.

Hudkins’s scoop on Inge the Lady Barber was written in 1957. Lonnie just didn’t know any better. This was back in those days when city editors still believed that Woman Gets Job was bigger than Man Bites Dog. And when the Lady Barber also turned out to be Fresh Off the Boat-she married a U.S. serviceman, whom she later divorced after coming to the U.S. in 1957- the typers of journalism went positively orbital. Ink flowed and presses rolled.

It all seems clumsy and retrograde today, but the mitigating factor is this: Inge doesn’t mind what you say, as long as you spell her name right and mention the address.

On Inge’s business cards for her little shop at 1606 Patterson is printed, to this very modern day, “All-Lady Barbershop.” And if that still draws in an occasional reporter wanting to know what’s the deal, hey-Inge’ll take the ink.

Hoo, boy, will she ever. After Inge got wind of the possibility of this most recent outlay of fresh ink on her behalf, she:

Insisted on giving us a haircut, and would under no circumstances let us pay for it. During this, she trimmed the Fu Manchu wings off the moustache, so that “you vill not look like der sourpuss nut der vings.”

Insisted that her shine guy give us a free shine (so good we’ll get another three years out of these shoes) and would not let us even tip him.

‧ Called us “schveetheart.”

Gave us two boxes of Ger man cookies and a bottle of Australian shampoo.

Tried to reimburse us for parking.

Actually tried to give us lunch money.

● And then asked if we would handle for her a subscription to the magazine.

● And then later called to dangle another free haircut if we’d just give her some warning before the photographer came.

In spite of her implied perceptions concerning just how cheap journalists really are, Inge Bentjen is a jewel, and even if she’s far from the only “Lady Barber” in town these days, she’s still one of a kind. The publicity-seeking pragmatism in no way diminishes her integrity; in fact, it’s integral to it. She’s one hundred percent pure-dee up-front.

Anyone in need of a Teutonic-style Earth Mother-and a more than passable haircut and some German cookies and maybe even lunch money-in the Central Business District need look no further than Inge’s Barbershop, though he might wish to bring a translator.

Inge insists dot sche spicks gut Enklische, but in spite of the fact that she’s been on this side of the Big Water for more than thirty years, we spent much of our time staring at the wall hoping for some subtitles, especially after sche schtarted tellink us der chokes vile de music playink on der loudenschpeakers vas “Buenos Dias, Argentina” in both der German und der Espanol.

Says Inge, “I ton’t go so much for der vrock and vroll,” and she adds, “I ton’t sink my customers do eizer.”

And the international atmosphere only got thicker after Dr. Jerry Dawson came in. Dawson, with the Baptist General Convention of Texas, is something of a Germano-phile, having taught German history. And Inge is something of a Baptophile, considering that maybe 10 percent of her business comes from them-she leases from First Baptist Church-and that her best-known haircut is that white pompadourish job on the saintly head of the Rev. W.A. Criswell. The only problem the Baptist association affords Inge is the choice of barbershop reading matter, which in most other shops includes Playboy.

“Sometimes I huff zem, but I haff to hide zem on account of ze Baptists,” she confides.

Dawson, who sports no inconsiderable head of white hair himself, brushes up on his German by reading from a German Bible almost daily, but, since it is in Honorific German rather than Low, Middle, or High, he comes in every couple of weeks to get a trim and sprechen hisself up a mess o’ Deutsch with Inge and the shop’s other barber, Anni Gassner, a soft-spoken Austrian immigrant Inge met twenty years ago at Kuby’s.

These guttural gabfests may be their idea of a guten tag, but to an outsider, it sounds like the Katzenjammer Kids Meet Sgt. Schultz.

But then, the tape recordings of our interviews made while Inge snipped and clipped away sound a lot like the Katzenjammers Meet Gomer Pyle.

“I learnded ze Enklish from you pipple, you East Texans,” she says. “If I don’t speak mit der so good Enklish, it’s you. If I say ’y’all,’ it’s because of y’all. No vunder I’m hart to unterstandt.”

One gets der impression dot, along with the accent, little else has changed with Inge since she left Kaiserslautern, a city of some 100,000 near Frankfurt, in late 1956.

She lived for a year in “Neb-araska, near ze birsplace of Chonny Carson” before coming to Dallas and landing a job as a barber in Pleasant Grove, for which she was qualified after three years as a barber’s apprentice in Kaiserslautern. In 1965 she bought a shop from a former employer, Weldon Reinke, in the Reliance Life Building. As her clientele of professional Baptists grew, so did her business association with them; she’s been leasing from First Baptist several years now, and when Criswel) needed her space in one of the Baptist office buildings earlier this year, he found her another.

Most notable about Inge is her love and devotion toward her customers, Baptists and the hellhound alike. Asking her to name some of the more prominent ones sends her into a genuine tizzy. “I’m afraid 1 might leaf vun out and he vould get his feelinks hurt. Zey are like my family to me. I tell you who are my kinder [children]: my customers.”

Many of those who’ve retired or were whipped out of downtown by the oil price crunch still brave downtown traffic and parking hassles to keep coming to Inge. And when she reopened, after being closed for a month for the move, bouquets awaited her. So the customers love her, too.

But, since her clientele does seem to be generally an older crowd, we’ve been getting increasingly nervous in the chair. In addition to being cheap, journalists are vain, and she’s been sawing away at our rangy mop with an old straight razor almost as much as she’s been using the clippers.

The big fear is that when she whirls the chair around to face the mirror we’ll find a younger Wall) Criswell staring back. Which, in our crowd, just would not do.

What a relief: actually, quite a good haircut.

We may even call to warn her about the photog, and get us another one.