Marga Coulp closes Typical Cutters salon of Portsmouth soon after 46 many years

PORTSMOUTH — More than 46 years immediately after founding her natural beauty salon, Marga Coulp, owner of Traditional Cutters, has determined to shut the curtains on just one of the city’s most neighborly firms.

Nevertheless she needed to extend the business’ tenure to 50 yrs, the closure is ensuing partly from the impacts of the coronavirus and her possessing to be the “COVID-19 police” with conventional functions. Inspite of the disappointment of the closure, Coulp is confident she is producing the right shift.

“When God sends you a gift and you never open it, you don’t know what is in it,” she stated.

With the doors officially shut on Saturday, Jan. 23, Coulp is finalizing a sale with a customer this 7 days and will begin to settle into retired lifestyle. When her plan will not be vacant, as she options to go on operating with local veterans like she has for decades, Coulp now has the time to sit back again and reflect on the far more than 100 people she has used, her faithful clientele and what the future retains.

“It’s been my entire lifestyle. It was just time to change the webpage,” she mentioned.

Common Cutters commenced on Broad Road in 1974 on the 2nd floor of a house run by a lady who also owned her possess salon. Right after the woman’s passing, she rented out the house from the woman’s son just before in the long run moving the business enterprise about to Islington Street. Later, in 1980, she eventually located the store’s prolonged-lasting house foundation on Albany Avenue in Portsmouth’s West Close.

Francis Label, Coulp’s quite first customer in Oct 1974, just lately arrived in for just one last haircut at the salon, an emotional capping off of an period marked by group and camaraderie that stood for a long time.

At times visitors who weren’t even coming in for haircuts would prevent into the shop and chat with Coulp and the stylists for hrs, ingesting the bottled h2o and feeding on the cookies she had established up. “You never just stroll into a salon and get to know 1 individual,” she said. “You get a rapport.”

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A pristine and aesthetically pleasing ambiance is what Coulp prided herself on as operator, investing time and dollars into exceptional and unforgettable features to her store. With its high ceilings, various mirrors and vibrant merchandise diligently organized on cabinets, Traditional Cutters also experienced quite a few posters of style continuous Marilyn Monroe scattered on the beige walls. 

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Consumers normally took notice of the female who Coulp claims often photographed properly. “People seriously relished that.”

A lasting staple of the salon was a roughly 6 toes tall, fringed black-shaded lamp of a skirted woman with a popped knee, a bejeweled tie and belt, as very well as a hand on her hip.

Common Cutters also featured an outdoors area at the rear of the shop in which stylists would generally try to eat lunch or go to have a cigarette, sitting on crushed rock at a glass table with an umbrella. The organization also experienced a rooftop yard on a drop.

“Those are the factors that folks will constantly try to remember about the store,” Coulp said.

A single of Coulp’s favourite memories of the salon’s approximately 5 decades was on a evening close to 12 decades in the past when some sock hop tunes started to play in excess of the speakers. She and her stylists like older tunes, so a shopper prompt she educate them all a dance from the late 1950s called “The Stroll.” That second in time sparked the idea to host a sock hop, with Coulp and her staff dressed in beehives and horn-rimmed glasses at the Portsmouth Elks Lodge.

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There was songs, there were being balloons and, previously mentioned all, there was $8,000 lifted for nearby veterans.