Young George Ruth was a major league babe in the woods and German officers were putting final touches on plans to attack Verdun when Bat Nelson slapped a straight razor up and down a leather strop and charged 15 cents for his first professional shave.
It was February 1916.A lot has changed since then. Babe Ruth is a baseball icon. The Battle of Verdun, the bloodiest of World War I, is now a video game. And Bat Nelson.
Maybe not that much has changed.
"That first day, I was the apprentice for the fourth chair," he recalls through 78 years of memories. "I arrived at the shop at 7 a.m. and the place was full up. But it was 10:20 a.m. before I had my first customer.
"He stepped into the room full of people and saw my empty chair and said, `Ah, a new barber in town. If there's anything I like, it's a new barber.' Before that first day ended I'd worked for 17 hours and taken in $1.65, of which I got $1.07.
"I was so excited I took my bosses out to eat and spent 90 cents across the street buying them dinner at the restaurant. When I finally walked home, I brought home 17 cents for 17 hours of work.
"And I was so happy."
He still is, at least when he's cutting hair.
Of course, Nelson is no longer the young barber in town. At 94, he is one of Alta Vista's surprisingly large class of full-time workers who are almost a full career's worth of working years past retirement age.
But, according to one trade magazine, Nelson merits special note as the oldest practicing barber in the United States. Even if the magazine missed an older one somewhere, he's certainly among the oldest working.
Each working day, Mondays through Saturdays, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., he waits in his two-chair Main Street shop. Some days he doesn't have a customer. Sometimes he's pretty busy.
Bill Cashman, a lanky, good-natured farmer, says he's been a regular for 40 years. Nelson tucks a white cloth around Cashman's neck. Cashman corrects himself - he's been a regular for more like 50 years.
It's clear Nelson's haircuts aren't fancy coiffures. On this Tuesday, Nelson doesn't ask Cashman what style he wants or what look he's going for. The barber just starts in with the scissors.
Cashman thinks some more. Make that 60 years, he says.
A snip here and there where the hair has grown unevenly in the past couple of weeks. Then out comes an electric razor. Nelson traces two half-moons above Cashman's ears.
"But this is 1994, isn't it," a pensive Cashman reflects. "Really, more like 70 years. In fact, I think I'm one of the early customers."
Flipping open a long straight razor, Nelson pauses to hold his right hand out in front of him.
"Still steady," he says, smiling at only the slightest of tremors. "I'm a lucky man for that. Bill was one of the early ones. I don't have any idea how many times I've done this to him."
Cashman shows no signs of nervousness as Nelson applies a little lather and scrapes away. The razor is almost 60 years old. In less than a minute, Nelson is finished.
He cleans Cashman's glasses and rubs some 3 Roses tonic through the finished haircut. Cashman pays $3 and leaves with a hairstyle he shares with many others around Alta Vista, a central Kansas town of about 430 residents.
In the town cafe just down the street from the fancy neon pole of Nelson's shop, Fred Clark sports one of Nelson's haircuts. In his 83 years, he's had hundreds.
"We've got two barbers in town," Clark admits, "and I go to both. Bat'll grease you up good with all that tonic of his. But he's a good old boy. I guess I still go to him once a month or so."
The only real business threat Nelson can remember, besides a fire that destroyed his first building, came from far away from the Flint Hills of Kansas.
"Those darn Beatles ruined the barber business," he says. "I remember on television seeing those girls jump up and down just to touch those boys with their long hair. I figured it was going to take quite a toll on my business, which it did."
But he survived.
Gloria Smith, a grandniece who runs a local general store, says everybody around here knows Bat Nelson.
"People who've moved away will come back to town and talk about the old barber they used to go to down the street," she says. "I tell them he's still up there cutting hair and they can't believe it. He's an institution around here."
Nelson thinks the secret of his long-lived success is simple.
"From that first day, if a man got in my chair once, he never failed to get back in there. I must have been kind of a natural barber."
Nelson was born in 1900. He was named Raymond Stanley Nelson, although he hasn't been known by anything except "Bat" for more than three-quarters of a century. He was nicknamed after a prizefighter of his early years.
Aside from a couple of years away in World War II, some in the service, some helping build aircraft, he's cut hair. He started work at the barbershop in 1909 as water carrier and moved up to bootblack boy before becoming an apprentice barber in 1916. He bought the shop outright over the next five years.
In 1926, he married Helen, still his greatest joy, and now the source of his greatest sadness. Several years after tripping over a cord and falling down some steps at church, Helen Nelson, 95, was placed in a nearby nursing home.
Before her fall, she had run - since the 1930s - the beauty salon attached to the barbershop.
"We worked side by side for more than 50 years," he says, his eyes watering. "Now it's all over, all over. I suppose that's why I'm here all day long. I don't really want to be at home without her.
"This is where I'm most at home, where I can still meet and talk to people. Some say I'm working too long. But really, if some afternoon, after the last customer has left, I happen to pass away here, well, that'd be just fine with me."