92 year old won't slow down...in addition to delivering cars he has his own "business" and "customers" at the local hospital.

Haskell resident Charles Swinson, a World War II veteran who is 92 years young, never seems to slow down.

When the former banker, businessman and cotton buyer in 1980 got too old to drive the local ambulance, he began a volunteer venture.

"I had seen a lot of people in the Haskell Memorial Hospital who needed help," Swinson said. "So I started shaving the patients that were not able to shave themselves."

Swinson began shaving them and said he doesn't know how "customers" have been groomed over the years.

"I go to the hospital as needed to shave men," he said. "I sometimes go seven days a week and sometime three."

A Haskell business provides him electric razors.

In addition to his volunteer work, he still works part time delivering cars for a local car dealer by driving the vehicles to Abilene.

He and his wife, Leatrice, 89, recently celebrated their 71st wedding anniversary by driving to Abilene to eat at Catfish Corner. They apparently like to keep it simple.

"We came to Abilene on our wedding day, Dec. 14, 1941," he said. "We ate at the Chicken Shack."

Swinson said he often runs into people whom he shaved in the hospital.

"I was in Ruidoso not too long ago and saw a man at church that I had shaved," Swinson said. "The man called out, 'There is my barber.' "

Another time, he was at a ballgame in Vernon and ran into a former hospital patient whom he had shaved who remembered him as well.

Asked for unusual experiences, Swinson said he shaved two ladies in his more than 30 years of volunteer work.

"I shaved a man and he asked me if I would shave his wife," Swinson said. "I thought he was joking, but he was not."

Swinson said it was strange shaving a woman, but he did it just the same.

"I sure didn't use any aftershave lotion on the women after the shave," he joked.

Swinson said he used to go to the rest home to shave, but regulations were changed over the years and he had to stop.

He even inspired a volunteer shaving service elsewhere in Texas.

"I shaved a man from Tyler who was in a wreck," Swinson said. "He went back home and started a shaving ministry of his own."

Swinson said the volunteer shaving service just popped into his mind when he was no longer permitted to drive the ambulance.

"My shaving people was not a church ministry," he said. "I just knew a lot of people who needed help."

The experience has broadened the Swinsons' family. The couple do not have children, nor brothers or sisters.

"But we do have a big family right here in this community," Swinson said.

Louetta Wallace, a Haskell resident who nominated Swinson as an "Everyday Hero," said Swinson sometimes goes to a person's home and shaves if requested.

"What a blessing Charles and his wife, Leatrice, have been to the community," Wallace said.