ORANGE PARK -- The Modern Barber & Style Shop withstood 11 presidencies and 21 international conflicts. But it still stands there in its original building on the corner of Kingsley Avenue and Mound Street, and its operators are still doing what owners in the past have always done -- cut hair and gossip.

Last Saturday, the barbershop held a small open house with cake and snacks to celebrate 60 years of haircuts. It’s hardly necessary, however, for the shop to have a day solely devoted to history, because the shop’s history hangs on the walls.

Old Coca-Cola advertisements, wrinkled photographs of Vietnam-era fighter jets -- they blanket the walls. At first glance, the shop appears half museum half barbershop.

But people appear to enjoy it, and many of the customers have been coming for upwards of 10 years.

“It’s a nice, friendly shop,” said Fay Wallace, the shop’s manager. “It’s been here, same location for 60 years. And we do three or four generations of people. When the granddaddies bring their grand kids in, it’s pretty good for us.

Above the barbershop mirrors hangs a head shot of the old owner, Bill Mann. He bought the shop in 1976 from a barber named Jimmy.

In 1956, however, a man named Heimy used the backroom as a taco and tortilla factory. Heimy’s family owned a local Mexican restaurant near the St. Johns River and shipped his tortillas all the way to St. Augustine.

The front end of the shop remained a barbershop since it was built.

A real estate agent by the name of Frank Basseti bought the shop from Heimy and converted the barbershop’s side room into a real estate office shortly afterwards.

When Mann took over in the late 70s, he left the original feel of Jimmy’s shop intact with all of the historic aircraft carriers and jet plane photographs and dubbed his shop the ‘Flat-top center of Florida’ considering the mostly military customers he received from area bases.

“That was before Cecil Field closed, we used to do a lot of the Blue Angel Pilots and higher-ups from the military, this was a military shop, one of the two that most of the military people came to,” Wallace said.

Mann kept his white hair long enough to dress up as Santa Claus and pass candy canes out to the children as they passed on the streets by the barbershop. He’d even cut hair in the festive outfit. Christmas was the only time he would come into work without a full suit.

Mann was up in the shop’s attic one day fixing a lightbulb when he died. He fell through the ceiling to his death, roughly a 10-foot drop. He left the shop to his daughter in his will. Shortly afterwards, Wallace took over operations.

“[There’s] a lot of history here,” Wallace said. “We just keep it going, you don’t have too many old-fashioned barbershops a lot of the chain places that open up. For a barbershop to stay open as long as we have, I think that says something about us.”

That was 25 years ago, she said, and not much has changed. They’re still a male only haircuttery specializing in fades, flat tops and shaves. The same pictures hang up around the shop. The shop has the same soul as always and the` same old gossip echoes down the hallways.

“If you know what’s going on, just ask the barbers,” Fay said.

“Just don’t ask them about politics,” her daughter, Allison chimes in.