FatherTed wrote:
more cool stories please dennis
SAN MARINO - Jann of Sweden, the flamboyantly hirsute barber whose Viking-cowboy persona has passed into local legend, celebrates his 40th anniversary in the city today.
"I've been here longer than Henry Huntington, the king of San Marino," Jann Eldnor boasted, in his trademark accent. "Now I don't speak Swedish, it got away from me. And I don't speak English either - I speak Swinglish," he joked.
Just how Eldnor - childhood fan of American westerns, graduate of the Swedish Royal Trade School and mandolin-player extraordinaire - morphed into the world's only known Swedish cowboy is quite a story.
And he has plenty of them.
Barrett Duff, 89, has heard more than a few in his 40 years as a client.
"Why would you go anywhere else?" said Barrett, a former San Marino resident, and one of many who regularly drive from Pasadena and beyond for a trim. "Not only do you get a good haircut, you get entertained."
Eldnor, with his flowing platinum hair, bushy beard, walrus moustache and omnipresent cowboy gear, acknowledged he's an odd fit for ultra-conservative San Marino.
But, to hear him tell it, he looked more like a clean-cut banker than a cowboy when he arrived from Sweden in 1970 to work in a barbershop on Wilshire Boulevard.
"I looked the same as when I was in the Swedish Air Force," he said.
Then a chance meeting at a Lake Avenue bus-stop with Scotsman Robert Ferguson, who owned the tiny barbershop at 2130 1/2 Huntington Drive, led to him buying the business for $700.
"That was for the goodwill and the customers - two of them," Eldnor joked.
Jann of Sweden, legendary barber gives Barrett Duff a hair cut. Duff has been getting haircuts from Jann of Sweden for 40 years. (Walt Mancini/ Staff photographer)He built the client list up by letting customers keep their hair fashionably long, he said. When everyone started cutting their hair short, he decided to let his grow.
Now he's the barber who hasn't had a haircut, and maybe a shave, since 1980. "Nobody believes I am a barber," he said. "Most barbers don't look like this."
The western look emerged in the early 80s, after he and his wife Lisbeth rented horses in Solvang.
"That's when I turned cowboy," he said. He bought a horse, learned to rope, and started his western collection.
"For sure my Swedish wife said you can't have all that cowboy stuff at home," he said.
So he brought it to the shop, which he describes as more like "a saloon than a salon."
First-timers might have a hard time finding the one sink and the antique 1886 barber chair that fight for space with silver saddles, Texas cattle horns, cow skulls, stuffed armadillos, deer heads, faux Remington bronzes, cowboy hats, plaques, photographs, proclamations, posters and a life-size cut-out of John Wayne.
Eldnor admits to being nervous when the salon is inspected, and tries to pass off any dust as "Old West" atmosphere.
His clients, who have included Merlin Olsen and Rosey Grier, don't seem to mind.
Certainly not Christopher Chichester, the charming young Englishman with the aristocratic background who often hung out at the shop, schmoozing with well-heeled clients.
"We call him `The Great Pretender,"' Eldnor said of "Chichester" - German national Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, who later posed as "Clark Rockefeller." Gerhartsreiter will go on trial in September for the 1985 murder of John Sohus, whose San Marino guesthouse "Chichester" once lived in and whose wife, Linda, is still missing.
When Gerhartsreiter was extradited from Boston last year for a pre-trial hearing in Alhambra, the colorful Eldnor soon became a favorite of the east-coast media.
Duff said his favorite headline was in a Boston newspaper after Eldnor said he was sure of the Rockefeller/Chichester connection: "Only his hairdresser knows for sure."
Eldnor does draw the spotlight, and he was a long-time participant in the Rose Parade until his group was dropped in 2008 in an equestrian-unit cutback, despite a robust letter-writing campaign and a 200-signature petition.
He got his 20 minutes of fame back home in 2009, when Swedish TV made a documentary about him as part of a series on expatriate Swedes. Unsurprisingly, "I was the only Swedish cowboy they found," he said at the time.
He went back to Stockholm for the showing, and said he became something of a sensation, with posters up all over Sweden and lots of old friends getting back in touch.
Eldnor, 68, isn't sure he'll make it to his 50th anniversary in town. He has 18 months left on his lease, but said it's hard to get new clients.
"My customers are getting old - I have to make house-calls," he said. "They don't give up on me, the give up on the 22 steps" up to the shop. "But I'd like to be here as long as I can."
And no plans yet to ride into the sunset.
