Taking a step inside Sel’s Barber Shop in downtown Hilo is like taking a step back in time.
The walls of the cozy, single-chair shop on Mamo Street have multiple mirrors. Otherwise, they’re adorned with an eclectic mix of items — a mounted axis deer buck head from Lanai, a watercolor painting of an adult nene with two goslings, a woven lauhala hat — and spot on, larger-than-life artist renderings of Warner Bros. cartoon characters including Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Yosemite Sam, Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, and the Tasmanian Devil.
“I was taking the wallpaper off the top of the wall, and one of my customers told me he could paint those cartoons there,” said Sel Brockmiller, now 80, who’s retiring at month’s end after 60 years of cutting hair — 40 of them in her current location.
“All the decorations on the walls are from customers,” she said.
The color orange is also prominent — including the cabinet doors behind her barber chair and the cushions of the sturdy steel-and-naugahyde sofas where her customers sit, waiting their turn to be shorn.
Brockmiller graduated from Pahoa High School in 1961. And while her haircutting aspiration developed early, it wasn’t her first career choice.
“When I was in high school, I really wanted to be a nurse,” said Brockmiller, whose parents named her Selina after a nurse who assisted with her birth. “But when I first worked for a doctor in high school, the doctor took me to the back room to do a minor surgery. And I saw all that blood. I couldn’t stand it.
“So, the next patient, she was a barber. We were talking story, and I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll be a barber, too.’”
Since then, she’s cut the hair of men and women. Her clientele has included business people, educators, laborers, police officers and firefighters — and at least two journalists, including this reporter.
Brockmiller survived a number of health setbacks in the past decade, including multiple heart attacks, a triple-bypass heart surgery and a stroke. Once an avid golfer, she now walks with a cane and can no longer hit the links. The stroke also has led to other consequences.
“A lot of my memory is gone — but I still know how to cut hair,” she said.
Brockmiller’s price has remained a more-than-reasonable $12 per haircut through good and bad economic times — and unlike some, she didn’t raise her fees during the pandemic.
“I enjoy coming to work, meeting people and just talking story. It’s nice,” she said.
“One thing my father told me, the night before I opened my shop, my parents took me out to dinner, and my father said, ‘Sel, promise me one thing.’ I said, ‘Yeah?’ ‘Number one, don’t talk about people and gossip. And don’t talk about religion, and don’t talk about politics. Keep those three things out of the shop.”
Brockmiller said she’s made her father’s advice her policy for her six decades in business.
Growing up in Pahoa, Brockmiller was familiar with another three-letter, single-named barber, Jan — whose shop still bears her name long after her own retirement. Many expected when Brockmiller graduated from barber college, she’d cut hair in Pahoa, as well.
“Whenever anyone said, ‘Why don’t you open your shop in Pahoa?’ I said, ‘I don’t want to compete against Jan. Jan’s an old-timer.’ She used to cut my hair, too, when I was small,” Brockmiller explained.
Brockmiller started her career at an established shop in Kona.
“Guys would come in, and I’d say, ‘Do you want a haircut?’ They’d look at me and say, ‘Ah, you look too young. I don’t want to cut hair with you,’” she recalled.
Brockmiller then moved to Hilo, working at a shop downtown on Haili Street, then opening her own shop at the corner of Kilauea Avenue and Lono Street, next door to the former Yama’s Store.
“I stayed there for 15 years,” she said.
A mother of four children — two still living — grandmother to three and great-grandmother to three, Brockmiller became an institution at her Mamo Street location.
“A lot of people come up to me and say, ‘You used to cut my grandfather’s hair,’” she said.
Multiple generations from the same families — her own included — have sat in Brockmiller’s chair.
“My oldest great grandson, Wyatt, he’s 11 years old,” she said. “One day I said to him, ‘Wyatt, what are you going to be when you grow up?’ He looked at me and he said, ‘A barber.’
“I said, ‘Really?’” she recalled and started to laugh.
“He’s too young, yet. I wish he was older so he could take over.”
Always community-minded, Brockmiller also goes to the customers who can’t come to her.
“I go to the senior center to cut hair. I go to the Life Care Center and cut hair. I make home calls, guys that cannot get out of bed,” she said.
Brockmiller’s fingers remain nimble, and she knits, making lap blankets for people in wheelchairs and “a lot of baby caps.”
Asked if she’s going to miss the shop, Brockmiller replied, “Oh, yeah.”
“I’m going to miss just meeting people and seeing who’s going to come in,” she said. “All through my years as a barber, I enjoyed everything.”
As for what’s next?
“Clean yard, pull grass,” Brockmiller said. “I don’t want to just stay home and watch TV. I want to keep on moving, because I don’t want to end up in a wheelchair.”
Email John Burnett at jburnett@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
