Bill the Barber is right at home working from his home.
Bill Morrow has a home-based barber business in Vernon's BX region, complete with sandwich board at the front of the Gibbs Road property he resides and works in, as well as a neon red-blue barber sign in the window of his basement suite.
The house is owned by longtime friends Ron and Shelly Wellington, who built the suite for Bill to live and work in.
Inside, he has a barber's chair, and all the equipment he's used since starting a lengthy journey to the Okanagan in the late 1960s.
"I'm open seven days a week, and I'll make house calls to places like the hospital," said Morrow, 77, who's hair-cutting career began on the Prairies.
Morrow is a native of Carlyle, Sask. 鈥� "120 miles southeast of Regina; 120 miles northwest of Minot (North Dakota); 120 miles west of Brandon; 120 miles south of Yorkton, Sask." 鈥� and is the oldest of five children who grew up on a grain farm with beef cows.
It was his dad, Bill Sr., who encouraged junior to get off the farm and learn a trade.
"He wanted me to be an electrician, a carpenter, a plumber," said Morrow. "None of those appealed to me."
But cutting hair did.
Morrow graduated from the Maurice Barber School in Regina on Dec. 10, 1969. He eventually landed a gig in Winnipeg before he returned to the family farm, and would stay there until 1990.
He got married a first time in 1970, and after buying a bulk fuel business in 1990, his wife, he said, left him, and wanted to take the farm and the business. That didn't happen.
In 1993, Morrow married for a second time, and bought a feed lot cleaning business, along with a house in White Bear Lake, Sask. His only son of five kids from his first marriage then wanted dad to join him in a landscaping venture, which did not work out.
So, in 2007, Morrow and his wife headed west and landed in Vernon. Morrow found work as a barber at Vernon's iconic Country Squire Barber Shop, owned and operated by Ted Enns.
"I thought I'd died and gone to heaven," said Morrow of his chance to work for the longtime Vernon barber.
Morrow was with Enns from March 2007 to Dec. 14, 2018 when, 11 days before Christmas, Morrow went home after work and discovered his wife had left.
In his words, Morrow "went nuts."
"I was lost," he said. "I couldn鈥檛 sleep. So I went and had a shower and drove to go see my kids in Alberta."
Still hurting from the split, Morrow went to Bucerias, Mexico, for three months. Upon his return to Canada, he ended up in Armstrong and returned to cutting hair at Sage Hair Studio.
"The owner was very good to me," said Morrow.
He stayed for two years before a disagreement with the owner severed their working relationship.
That's when the Wellingtons took him in, built him a suite to live, and encouraged him to continue cutting hair. Some of his clients from Armstrong will make the 20-minute drive into Vernon to see him, chat, and get their hair cut.
"I went looking for a place to cut hair and my friends helped me out," said Morrow, whose nephew is retired NHL forward Brendan Morrow, an Olympic gold medalist in hockey.
Morrow hasn't considered hanging up the clippers and scissors just yet.
"Retire? What would I do?" he chuckled.
You can reach Morrow at 1-403-635-8838 for an appointment.