Luis Garcia bought the historic Roosevelt Barber Shop three years ago, carrying the legacy of the century-old space into the modern age.
Writer: Mike Wellman
Photos: Duane Tinkey
Barbershops have always been more than just places that sell haircuts. Get this: Those red, white and blue swirling poles trace back to when medieval barbers also performed bloodletting — red for blood, white for bandages and blue for veins. Today’s shops still offer more than trims and shaves, but now in the form of community and camaraderie.
At Dreamers, also known as the Roosevelt Barber Shop, the clippers produce the buzz you hear, but there’s another one you can feel. This place goes back roughly a century, but it’s been steaming, and dreaming, full speed ahead since Luis Garcia bought it three years ago.
Garcia is 34. He came to America from Mexico in 2003 with his mother. He spoke no English. “School was hard,” he understated. But he studied just as hard and graduated from East High in 2010. He tried to go to barber school, but as an undocumented immigrant, got stuck in bureaucratic limbo until 2012, when the federal government set up DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) for the so-called Dreamers.
“Everything changed,” Garcia said. “I could get a Social Security number. I could go to school and get my barber’s license.”
He met his wife, Lacy, at the American College of Hairstyling. He cut hair for a couple of years on Hull Avenue before another classmate, Jordan Peterson, invited him to work at his Paramount shop in the East Village. “I told Jordan, ‘OK, five years,’ but then I was going to open a shop of my own,” Garcia said.
Then came the COVID pandemic, when social distancing hit barbershops hard. Rick Adkisson, who owned the Roosevelt shop, started looking for a buyer. He still wanted to cut hair but without the pressure of running the business. He put out feelers and asked Peterson, who had previously expressed some interest. The timing wasn’t right, but Peterson knew someone who was ready for the opportunity.
“Jordan told Rick about me, and we set up a meeting,” Garcia said. “He told me his price, and I didn’t even negotiate. I said, ‘It’s a deal.’”
Only afterward did Adkisson float an additional request: Might there still be room at the shop for him? Garcia assured him there would be and doubled the number of chairs.
“Rick’s been like a dad to me,” Garcia said.
For his part, Adkisson was happy to sell the biz but keep the buzz. “Luis and I met and hit it off,” he said. “He was excited by the prospect of owning his own shop, and when we discovered we have the same birthday, we figured that was a sign it was meant to be.”
Adkisson now works a chair a little closer to the back door, a subtle suggestion that he is nearing the end of his career now that the succession plan ensures the future of this neighborhood cornerstone.
On the left, former Gov. Norm Erbe gets a trim at the Roosevelt Barber Shop in this photo from around 1990. Rick Adkisson, in blue, still works there.
On a shelf in the shop, a collection of Roosevelt High School yearbooks goes back decades, clear to the days when football players were expected to report for tryouts with crew cuts. Many of them got buzzed for free at the shop, where they’d line up like military draftees reporting for boot camp.
Back then, the school was overwhelmingly white. But now it’s a hearty demographic stew, a “majority minority” school where just under half of the student body is white, according to school district data. It’s no wonder then that the area’s commercial mix reflects that shift.
When school resumed in the fall of 2022, right after Garcia bought the shop, he riffed on the old free crew-cut tradition. With his colleague Maya Quintanilla, who founded Barbers for the Future in 2019, they offered free back-to-school haircuts for all students, no matter whether they played football, and every customer got to choose their own style. The promotion for the shop’s grand reopening drew quite a crowd.
These days, the shop is still buzzing, just as it has since 1934, even though it’s sporting a slightly different style. Kids can no longer mooch pennies for the gumball machine in the corner, but customers are welcome to help themselves to a complimentary cerveza from the cooler. Walk-ins are rare; most services are by appointment. The lively banter is a mix of English and Spanish, but everyone understands the language of goodwill.
When Garcia got married in 2015, he qualified for a green card but didn’t stop there. Last year, he took part in the annual naturalization ceremony the Iowa Cubs host at Principal Park on the Fourth of July. The eligibility test Garcia took beforehand included the usual questions about American history and government — plus a few extras.
“The guy started asking me about my job,” he recalled. “What did I do for a living? Where did I work? That sort of thing. I wondered what was going on. I thought I had passed the test.”
It turned out his examiner just wanted to make appointments so he and his son could get haircuts. So yeah, he’d certainly passed.
The day I interviewed Garcia he’d just come from the dentist. He flashed the smile of someone who wouldn’t have to do that again anytime soon, someone whose American — no, make that universal — dream has come true.
Contributor Mike Wellman is a local freelancer, author, former staff writer for the Des Moines Public Schools and retiree who’s lived in Des Moines his whole life — a really long time.
