By Ted Kleine
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My best find to date is a genuine “Nixon/Agnew” bumper sticker that’s now on display in my living room. I bought it from Chicago’s king of political kitsch, Russell Riberto, who sells campaign curios out of his Southwest Barber Shop at 2404 W. 111th Street. Sit down for a trim and you face a shelf holding busts of Abe Lincoln, Will Rogers, Pericles, Dante, and Vladimir Lenin. Lean back for a shave and you’ll see dozens of old newspapers hanging from the ceiling, including a tattered copy of the Tribune’s “Dewey Defeats Truman” edition and the Chicago Evening News’s Armistice Day offering: “Huns Quit! Peace!” To the left of the price list, which advertises “House Calls–$20 to $30,” is a bulletin board impaled with a century’s worth of campaign buttons. There’s a George Wallace pin that fades from his photo to his slogan–“Stand Up For America!”–when it’s tilted up and down. And there are several declaring “Hey! Hey! Vote for Ray!” left over from when Republican Ray Wardingley, otherwise known as Spanky the Clown, used the shop as his campaign headquarters when he ran for mayor in 1983.
Politics also gave his place a classier tone than most barbershops, which used to be little stag clubs where the only reading material was Esquire and Playboy and the conversation consisted of football commentary and dirty jokes.
The most lucrative items in Riberto’s shop are his old license plates. People are willing to spend big money for them, especially antique car collectors–“They’ve already spent $50,000 on a car.” When Brian De Palma was filming The Untouchables in Chicago, his crew called Riberto looking for Illinois license plates from the 1920s. Riberto had them, of course: he’s got plates from every state, every era, from the Wyoming plates with the silhouette of the bucking cowboy to the Tennessee plates stamped in the shape of the state. He’s a member of the Automobile License Plate Collectors’ Association, and he considers License Plates of the United States: A Pictorial History “the greatest book ever published.”
“I’m an educated person,” he boasts. “I can hold a conversation with anybody. I may be just a barber, but I can hold a conversation with the president of the United States.”
