Taking a little off the top at City Hall East

By John Katsilometes

Saturday, April 11, 2009 | 2:54 p.m.

It is often referred to as City Hall East, and often it is just that, as Mayor Oscar Goodman sits in the same chair manned by Gary Reese since Reese first started shearing hair and shaving faces more than 45 years ago. City Hall East is Gary and Derrill’s Barber Shop, tucked back in the same eastside shopping plaza it has occupied since Reese set up shop on the northwest corner of Bonanza Road and Eastern Avenue in 1963. The business itself dates to 1959, which coincidentally is usually the style of haircut offered at Gary and Derrill’s. There seem to be two styles available: The Fonzie and the Danny Zuko.

“This is not a salon cut,” Reese warns as he busts out the comb and clippers. Hold the Brylcreem, I say.

This Reese is the same Reese who serves on the Las Vegas City Council, representing Ward 3. He’s also mayor pro tem, a largely ceremonial title that allows Reese to preside over City Council meetings when Goodman is away chasing down leads for pro sports arenas or attending national mayoral conferences. Does he gain possession of the mayor's ever-present showgirls? "No," says Reese, not really the showgirl type.

It’s a little unnerving, to be honest, to have an active member of the City Council literally breathing down your neck, applying hot lather with one hand and running a sharpened straight-edge along your cheek with the other. Reese and his partner, Derrill Price, resorts to some old-time barber schtick, producing a bucket from his supply closet and saying, “This is to catch the blood.” The difference between a nick and a cut? “A cut requires stitches,” Derrill says. As he slaps some demonic brand of aftershave cologne -- maybe Hai Karate or Match Light lighter fluid -- you wince and call out, “Yow, baby!”

“Wuss” is Reese’s time-honored response.

Plaza customers give Reese a continuing education about the issues of the day, knowledge he says he takes with him to City Hall. “I might not be the best-educated person, but I know what is on people’s minds,” says Reese, whose formal education topped out at Dixie College in St. George, Utah, before he moved to Vegas to work at the Nevada Test Site. Goodman himself says he receives counsel from Reese between passes with the clippers. The charge for a haircut is $12, same as a shave, not too shabby. But business is down these days, naturally, at Gary and Derrill’s, about 30 percent because of the economy. People are waiting longer between pit stops in the increasingly shaggy Ward 3.

Reese is in his final term on the council. He has a couple of options: Step down from public service to resume a full-time career as a barber, or make a run at the mayor’s seat when Goodman vacates, knowing that Goodman could still angle to serve beyond his current term because of the city’s financial crisis. “I don’t want to put words in the mayor’s mouth, but he has said that if I run, he’ll endorse me. But those would be some big shoes to fill.” It’s highly likely Reese will run, and if he becomes the next mayor of Las Vegas, then he’ll have to depart the first chair at Gary and Derrill’s for the first time in a very long time. Since 1963, to be precise.