Obituary
In the care of Solemn OaksHoward "Buck" Buckley, 86, of White Cloud, died Wednesday, July 15, 2026, at home, having spent fifty-two years keeping the best-kept confidences in the county. He was a barber — the barber, for a couple of generations of White Cloud men — and his shop on Wilcox Avenue was where you got your first haircut, your wedding trim, and, if you were a certain kind of local boy, the closest thing to counsel you were ever going to sit still for.
He was born January 30, 1940, in Big Rapids, the son of Earl and Mabel Buckley, and picked up the nickname Buck before anyone now living can quite say why, though it stuck harder than Howard ever did. He came home from barber college in Grand Rapids in 1962, hung out his pole in White Cloud in 1964, and cut hair in the same three-chair shop — though he only ever needed the one chair — until he finally hung up the shears in 2016.
For fifty-two years the shop opened at eight, the coffee was terrible and free, and the magazines were exactly as old as you feared. Buck gave flat-tops to men who had gotten flat-tops from him as boys, and to their boys after that. He knew who was getting married, who was hiring, who was down on their luck and needed the haircut to be on the house without being told so, and who had said what about whom — and he took all of it to the grave, which was the whole secret of the business. He talked hunting and weather and the Tigers and never, ever politics, and the shop was the one place in three townships where men who agreed on nothing else could sit and wait their turn in peace.
He was a soft-spoken man with a sharp memory and a dry way of landing the funny line quietly enough that you had to be paying attention to catch it. He coached nobody and sponsored everybody; his name rode the back of thirty years of Little League jerseys and bowling shirts. He kept a jar of suckers for the nervous little ones and a straight razor and hot towel for the old-timers who still wanted the full treatment, and he gave a great many young fathers their squirming toddler's first haircut, tucking the saved curl into a little envelope without being asked.
He kept the shop's old barber pole after he retired, mounted it by his back door, and switched it on some mornings just to watch it turn. He said it reminded him of the men. He meant, his family knew, that it reminded him of the whole long conversation — half a century of it — that had come and sat in his chair and told him everything.
He is survived by his wife of sixty years, Nancy; his children, Steve (Kim) Buckley of White Cloud and Julie (Marc) Hasper of Grand Rapids; six grandchildren; eight great-grandchildren; his brother, Gene Buckley of Big Rapids; and a couple of generations of White Cloud men who will be getting their haircuts somewhere else now, and saying, every one of them, that it isn't the same.
He was preceded in death by his parents and his sister, Darlene Foss.