Raymond "Razor" Gray cuts hair in his shop in this 2010 photo.
Raymond "Razor" Gray cuts hair in his shop in this 2010 photo. Razor Blade Double Edge
BAR HARBOR — Raymond Gray, known to almost everyone as Razor Ray, who cut hair in Bar Harbor for more than five decades, died Aug. 30 at Mount Desert Island Hospital. He was 87.
“He was a Bar Harbor institution; there’s no other way to say it,” said Earl Brechlin, a Bar Harbor Town Council member and founding editor of the Islander. “There are not that many places in any community where everybody from every walk of life intersect on a level playing field. The barbershop is one of those places. You hear a lot of stories and share a lot of stories there. It just becomes part of the fabric of the community.
“Ray was very patient,” Brechlin said. “He was great with little kids when they went in for their first haircut.”
Barbershops were in their heyday when Gray got his start in the early 1960s. After serving in the Army, he signed up for a six-month course at Hanson’s School of Barbering in Lewiston.
After graduation, his first job was in Orono, at the University of Maine. In an interview with the Islander in 2018, he admitted being “a little nervous” when his first customer sat down in the chair. And he admitted being slow at first. But that soon changed.
“There were three other barbers,” Gray recalled. “I just kind of picked up some of their good habits and I got faster after a while.”
He went into business for himself on Main Street in Bar Harbor, and while his barbershop moved a few blocks up from 5 Main St. to 268 Main St., he was a fixture in Bar Harbor for more than half a century.
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