Listen to the chatter in Stan Nadel’s Hair Razor barber shop on Fallbrook Avenue in Woodland Hills and you quickly realize he’s doing the same thing he’s been doing for the past 42 years: giving good haircuts and providing his customers all men with a place to call their own. “It’s really the last place for guys to hang out, if you really think about it,” said Jack Silver, who patiently waited his turn one day last week, browsing through more than a dozen magazines piled on a small wooden table. A regular customer for the past five years, Silver doesn’t mind the wait. “It’s like going back home again,” said the retired shoe company owner. “When I was a kid, I went to a barber shop just like this and it was great.” The Hair Razor hasn’t changed much since the 1960s when Nadel moved the shop across the street, saying the traffic was better on the east side of Fallbrook Avenue closer to Victory Boulevard. Nadel opened the first shop when he got out of the Navy in 1958. One wall is papered with ducks, fishermen in boats and a marshy lake. Four 40-year-old hydraulic chairs, still in what look like mint condition, are lined up in front of large mirrors and a sparkling clean countertop with neat rows of scissors and razors but not a single blow dryer or jar of hair mousse. Nadel and his son, 40-year-old Craig, following in his father’s footsteps, average 30 to 40 customers a day for their $14 haircuts and the occasional shave. The Nadels won’t talk about revenue targets or profit margins or price structures. They just say they do well enough to keep going. “It’s a small place, but we get quite a few customers who still marvel at the fact that they can come to a place like this,” said Craig, who has been cutting hair next to his father since 1985. It’s a place where the barber asks about a customer’s family or a recent trip to the doctor. The customers one afternoon last week all knew each other and traded stories and one-liners. One customer spoke of his son-in-law, a second told the others about his last fishing trip, others chimed in with their own tall tales of fishing trips long past. “There are few places where guys can go to hang out. Women have the gyms, the salons, but guys don’t have a place sometimes,” Craig said. “So they come here and hang out for a few hours, get a haircut and have a good conversation.” The Hair Razor’s had its share of celebrity regulars through the years: country singer Johnny Cash, former Dodgers catcher Roy Campanella, ex-boxer Carlos Palomino and actor Gary Sinise. “It’s the atmosphere here. It’s relaxed and everybody knows everybody else,” Craig said The shop, a male-dominated establishment, is also Vicki Martel’s workplace she shaves customers with a four-inch, single-blade razor. “It was tough at first, when the customers didn’t know me, but that went away pretty fast. Now they trust me. I guess they have to,” she quipped. As cheerful as the shop may be, it is part of a dying breed, said Frank Chirco, president of the California Barber Association, which he said represents more than 10,000 barbers across the state. “There are a lot more salons than barber shops and there are less barber shops every year,” he said. In fact, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 9,400 barbershops in the U.S. in 1999, down from 33,000 in 1972. “But we feel that enrollment at barber colleges are up and that’s good news,” Chirco said. Claude Gipson, director of American Barber College, the only school of its kind left in Los Angeles, said he graduates about 40 students each year. “It’s good self-employment for them if they become barbers, and that in itself is pretty good enticement,” he said. But even Gipson believes that barber shops will have to diversify beyond the traditional haircut and a shave if they want to stay in business. “You have to have someone who does a manicure, someone who does facials, who does coloring and everything else, or you’re not going to survive,” he said. That’s why three years ago Gipson’s school began offering courses in color application and manicuring, once the province of cosmetology schools. But Stan Nadel and his son Craig will brook none of that in their shop. As far as they’re concerned, a haircut and a shave are still good enough. “We do what our clients want and we do it better than anybody else,” said Craig. “Other people are doing coloring and perming and they can do that, but we won’t.”