HILO, Hawai'i — As a young girl, Sumie Ushijima didn't want to be a barber. When her father told Sumie she was being apprenticed to a Japanese barber who ran a shop near the Suisan Building in Waiakea, the 14-year-old girl wept.

Then, she dried her eyes and went off to work. It was 1932, and as the second-eldest of eight children of a fisherman, Sumie understood she did not have the luxury of finishing school. Her family needed for her hands to be busy.

Haircuts and shaves became her life's work until last week, when the 87-year-old Ushijima finally decided it was time to rest.

On Dec. 13 Ushijima gave a free haircut to everyone who came in, and then closed her one-room barber shop at the busy Hilo corner of Puainako and Kilauea streets, ending a 69-year career of scissors, razors and soap.

The shop is almost empty, the chair has been sold, and two weeks ago someone stole the sign out front that announced the location of Ushijima Barber Shop. The county plans to knock down the tiny shop as part of a project to widen Puainako Street, erasing a bit of Hilo small-business history to make room for more cars.

There are still a few stand-alone one-room barber shops along Big Island highways, but they have begun to look out of place, as if even late-blooming Hilo town has passed them by.

For Ushijima, barbering began at the home of Yoshi Wada, a barber trained in Japan who had no children. Sumie's father was a customer of Wada, who ran a shop on land that is now the golf course on Banyan Drive, across the street from the Suisan Building.

Under the terms of the agreement brokered by Sumie's father, Sumie was to live with her mentor and work Monday through Saturday, cleaning, cooking, washing clothes and doing yard work for her. She would also learn barbering.

The girl was so dutiful and hard-working that Wada became very fond of her, and even wanted to adopt her and take her back to Japan.

Instead, Sumie stayed in Hilo to help support her family, and met her future husband at that shop. He lived in a rented room for single men above the shop, and Sumie would cut his hair there.

She and her husband decided she should open her own shop, which she did in 1938 at age 20, she said. Her husband was owner of a Hilo fish market, and they had two children.

Her first shop was next to the Waiakea Theater, and escaped major damage in the 1946 tsunami. She was not so lucky in the 1960 tsunami, which destroyed her shop and the rest of old Waiakea town.

After the 1960 tsunami, she cut her clients' hair in her home in Waiakea House Lots for about a year, and then opened a new shop next to what is now Ken's House of Pancakes. She moved to her last location at the Kilauea and Puainako intersection in 1987.

In the early years, Ushijima would cut hair for women and children, but later would accept only men. She emphasized how grateful she is to all of her customers, but recalled how some women would ask for a cut, wait until it was completed, and then ask her to take off more. This did not sit well.

"Tell me at the beginning how short you want! I can't stand that kind," Ushijima said.

Ushijima Barber Shop was a friendly place, but it was no social club. Ushijima deliberately priced her haircuts below the going rate in Hilo to keep her shop busy, and it worked.

When she closed, she was charging $6 for a haircut, and still had a few elderly customers who had been coming to her for haircuts ever since she worked as an apprentice. Even her customers advised her to charge more. "I'd say, 'That's OK, my rent is not going up, so it doesn't matter,' " she said.

Ushijima was honored with a certificate of achievement by the Big Island County Council yesterday, and even bumped into old customers there. Councilman Donald Ikeda recalled going with his friends to get haircuts from Ushijima when Ikeda was a 10-year-old growing up in old Waiakea town.

"It was really cheap," recalled Ikeda, 64. "The lady was always nice."

Ushijima plans a busy retirement, filled with sewing patchwork quilts, cooking for church activities and trips to Las Vegas. As it turns out, she has a knack for the dollar slots, and once took home a $7,200 jackpot.

"I'm more on the lucky side, you know," she said with a smile.

Reach Kevin Dayton at kdayton@honoluluadvertiser.com.