For the Shear Love of It

With its shuttered storefronts and accompanying air of desolation, Western Avenue south of Vernon is an unlikely spot for what may be L.A.’s most striking vocational school. And that’s just the way Arthur Borner wants it.

Borner’s Barber College is, first and foremost, a training facility for aspiring clipper masters. But the three-story building, whose modest exterior belies the school’s majestic confines, is also an eloquent rejoinder to the economic disenfranchisement of the inner city.

Walk in the door and the drudgery of urban decay gives way to a sparkling vision of entrepreneurial inspiration. The expansive main room recalls a colonial-style home, with an 18-foot ceiling, columns and a corner balcony. Old-fashioned barber chairs in deep red and other, less-vivid hues ring two sides of the room. The place is immaculate.

“You’re not going to find any school like this in California,” says the impeccably groomed Borner, surveying his labor of love. “Why did I do it?” he asks rhetorically. “I want the finest.”

Getting the finest in South-Central, however, proved a challenge. The look in Borner’s large eyes shifts from levity to indignity as he talks about his inability to obtain a loan to buy the property. Undeterred, Borner and his wife, Velma, poured their life savings into the enterprise. She held on to her job as a CAT scan operator, while he refurbished the former nightclub from the ground up, often sleeping at the site. As the finishing touch, Borner adorned the walls with a pictorial history of the African American experience, including harrowing depictions of slavery and segregation. The chronological display ends with the framed barbering certificates of his staff and a glowing portrait of him and his wife.

Borner, originally from Bogalusa, La., spent 10 years in the military before settling in for a 23-year stint with TRW as a data manager. He made the leap to barbering in 1990, when a young woman whom the Borners were putting through barber college asked them to buy the school, which then occupied a rental space in Lynwood. Borner earned his barber’s license and has never looked back.

With only four full-time and four part-time enrollees, he’s not making any money, but that’s OK by him. He really did this, he says, to ease the barber shortage and to nurture self-reliance among young people in a part of the city where opportunity rarely knocks. “It’s clean work, it’s easy work, and you’re your own boss,” Borner explains. “You can go from nothing to being something in your community.”