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**If you know a "Smart Woman" or if you think you have an interesting Smart Woman topic, you can contact Candice at cmadsen@ksl.com.**Candice Madsen
Traditional barber shops are disappearing from main streets across the country, but one woman in Utah is determined to make sure the trade is passed down to the next generation. She recently opened Utah's only exclusive barber school.
The State Legislature passed a bill during its last session that created a license for barbers. This means someone wanting only to cut hair can go to barber school, instead of cosmetology school. When Lynell Hite heard about this, she recognized an opportunity.
The sound of a barber's razor triggers favorite boyhood memories for a lot of men. Hite, the owner of The Barber School, says, "We have so many people tell us one of their best memories was going with their dad to the barber shop when they were younger."
Hite wants to make sure that tradition continues. She recently opened Utah's only barber school. Here students will master everything from the scalp massage, to the precision cut, and of course the arcane technique of the straight-edge.
It's rare to find a woman barber. She says, "Men like to go to men, and they like that camaraderie."
But Lynell says she loved cutting hair alongside her husband for more than 20 years. She pulled him out of retirement to teach at her school and recruited several other master barbers. Tim Hite says, "The art of learning to cut hair is everything we're focusing on."
Master barbers are very particular about the tools they use. They are an extension of their hands, and once they break them in it's hard to use anybody else's.
All the teachers have decades of experience and knowledge that they are eager to pass on. Lynell says she has a long list of salons and barber shops ready to hire her graduates.
Here's a little barber trivia for you. Barbers originally performed surgeries, as well as gave hair cuts. So the red stripes on a barber's pole represent blood, the blue stripes represented the veins and the white stripes represented bandages. The pole itself represents the staff that the patient gripped during the procedure to encourage blood flow.
For more information on The Barber School, click on the related link.
Salt Lake Community College also has a barber program.
