AUBURN — After a quarter of a million haircuts, barber Harold Smith is preparing to hang up his scissors and clippers.

On April 27 — four days shy of his shop’s 50th anniversary — he is retiring.

“In one way, I’m looking forward to it,” Smith, 75, said. “In another way, it’s going to be awfully tough. You get into a mode of doing things the same way every day. That’s the truth.”

He’ll miss the folks who plop into his barber chair to talk about politics, the Red Sox, the deer they almost shot or the fish they almost caught.

“It’s been a great 50 years,” he said.

Smith, who grew up in East Wilton, was 25 when he started. He had spent a couple of years in the military and, when he returned to Maine, enrolled in Hanson’s Barber School on Lisbon Street in Lewiston. He worked in a few shops — in Bath, York and North Conway, N.H. — before he hung a barber pole at a little place of his own beside the former Dunlap Building in downtown Auburn.

He entered a competitive marketplace with lots of barbers.

“You just had to be as good as the guy on the next corner,” Smith said. “It all starts going by word of mouth, more or less.”

Quickly, he established his shop as a hangout. Guys played table tennis and cribbage.

“There were a lot more people walking around,” he said. Among them were Auburn police officers, who became such fixtures there that the Police Department installed a charging station when they began carrying portable walkie-talkies.

“I just liked people and I built up a clientele,” Smith said.

He also built a family. He and his wife, Carol, married a few months before he opened the shop, raised three sons: Rick, Gary and Mike.

In 1985, Smith moved up the hill to 49 Hampshire St. Nine weeks later, an upstairs apartment caught fire. He weathered the water from the firefighters’ hoses and kept cutting hair. It’s where he remained.

“If you grew up here in Auburn, it is quite possible that the first haircut you received was from him,” Gary Smith said. “If you or your parents were not able to get out of the house for medical or other reasons, or were confined to one of the area nursing homes, he probably came to you to cut your hair after work during a week night or Saturday afternoon when the shop closed. It didn’t matter if you were homeless, or if you were one of the business leaders of the community, he never turned anyone down.”

He also worked alongside a stylist, Gloria Croteau, for much of the time. She began with Smith in 1981 and continued until last year, when she became ill.

Smith originally planned to retire last year, but he scuttled that notion in order to hit the 50-year mark.

Now, it’s time, he said. Decades of standing led him to get his knees replaced a few years ago. His back aches. He wants to spend more time around his Auburn home and his wife, Carol.

But he wonders what life will be like without the visitors, he said.

“I want to thank all of the people in Auburn, Lewiston and surrounding towns,” he said. “I’ll miss it.”

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