Classic Cutters

Classic Cutters will open today at 12:00.
Thursday Feb, 20th

We will be closed Wednesday, February 19 due to inclement weather.❄️

Here's to an extraordinary man on his birthday! 🎂

We are closed today ❄️

Love our history!

Happy New Year, everybody! Here is our first Flashback Friday post of 2025 with a clip and a snip.

Hall of Fame barber Norman Satterfield learned to cut hair during his three-year enlistment in the U.S. Navy in the 1950s. The photograph was part of a museum exhibit in 1992 on the history of barbering that included a look at Satterfield’s career. To publicize the exhibit at the Museum of Science and Natural History (now the Museum of Discovery), the North Little Rock Times published this photo on April 16, 1992, showing Seaman First Class Satterfield giving a haircut to an unidentified sailor.

Born and raised on a farm near Swifton in northeast Arkansas, Satterfield settled in North Little Rock after serving in the Navy and began cutting hair at Bowman’s Barber Shop at 713 Main Street. He opened his own barbershop in the mid-1960s at 715 Main. In 1971, he relocated to 5003 JFK and moved again in 1974 to 5618 JFK, where he managed Gentleman’s Choice, which he renamed Classic Cutters in the early 1980s. Half of his customers were women and he employed as many as 30 barbers and hair stylists.

Interviewed in 1992 for the exhibit, Satterfield said he gave haircuts to Five Star General Douglas MacArthur and U.S. President and General Dwight D. Eisenhower while aboard the U.S.S. Essex aircraft carrier in 1957. He told interviewer Lori Gunnell that he went to the captain’s quarters thinking he would be cutting the captain’s hair but soon met MacArthur and Eisenhower, who were there for a change of command of the carrier.

According to Gunnell, Satterfield said he remarked to MacArthur that they had something in common. The old general asked, what might that be son? Satterfield told him he was from Arkansas. “So,” a terse MacArthur retorted, to which the young Satterfield replied, “Well, begging your pardon, sir, but you are too.” MacArthur, for whom MacArthur Park in Little Rock and MacArthur Drive in North Little Rock are named, insisted he wasn’t from Arkansas.

“I was born there son,” MacArthur clarified. “But I’m from all 48 states.” Alaska and Hawaii had not yet been admitted to the union.

Three days after the haircuts, President Eisenhower mobilized the 101st Airborne to enforce the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School.

Satterfield died in 2001.

Have a great weekend, everybody!

North Little Rock Tourism