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Recently, while talking about getting a haircut and losing the nine-inch ponytail he’s sported for many months, Sweet Briar College Chaplain Adam White — not surprisingly — used a biblical reference.

He recalled the story of Sampson, a hero from the Book of Judges whose long hair was tied to his amazing strength. White joked that his talent as a guitarist for Sweet Briar’s faculty-staff rock band, FaSt, might suffer a similar fate after his shearing.

Chaplain White joked that he was filled with “fear and trepidation” prior to getting his hair cut. Here, he looks like maybe he wasn’t kidding.“Maybe this should be sort of a Sampson kind of thing,” White, an ordained Methodist minister, said the day before his haircut. “Can he be a rock star without the hair? It raises the question of whether my rock star skills are in the hair.”

White had been planning to crop his light-brown locks for awhile, but was waiting until his hair was long enough to be of some philanthropic good. He needed an eight-inch ponytail to donate his hair to Pantene Beautiful Lengths, a program that provides free wigs to women undergoing cancer treatment.

And the timing was right, too, to let go of the hair. “Because this season of life has run its course,” White said. “It’s just time. I have the requisite length to be able to give it away, which I had always intended to do.”

So, early Tuesday morning, Nov. 3, White, with photographer in tow, went to Ron Richie’s Barber Shop in Amherst. It was shortly after 9 a.m., and shop owner Richie and barber Susan O’Neil were cutting hair.  

Three or four men sat on benches, awaiting their trims, and behind them on the paneled wall hung banners from the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech, along with two deer trophies. When space was available, White sat down, too.

White told Richie, who was giving a buzz cut to a red-headed man who looked to be in his mid-20s, that he had thought about getting a Mohawk — just for one day — and using egg whites to make the hair stand up straight, punk rock style.

“I still have to work in this town,” White said, dismissing the idea.

When it was his turn, White sat down in Richie’s chair. After a little debate between White and the two barbers as to whether a run-of-the-mill rubber band or standard ponytail holder would hold the ponytail in place best, the trio opted for a rubber band. Richie cut off White’s ponytail and handed it to him. It looked like a small, dead animal.

 “Now it’s time to fix you up and make you look decent,” Richie, a retired Army sergeant said.

For the next few minutes, Richie cut White’s hair and the pair talked about work at Sweet Briar, politics and religion, and Richie, a former Army recruiter, tried to talk White into enlisting as an Army Reserve chaplain. When he was finished, Richie turned White around in the chair to look at his handiwork in the mirror. “Good grief!” White said. “I could get a job with a haircut like this!”

Richie started sweeping up the tufts of hair that littered the tile floor. “He’s no longer a hippie,” he said, referring to the now clean-cut White. “I can smile now.”