Doyel: At Cloverdale barber shop a haircut is $11. The Indiana basketball lore and love story are free.

CLOVERDALE – A man’s memories are mounted on the walls here. They’re taped to the mirrors, hanging from the ceiling. It’s the history of a basketball state, and Larry Bird is here. Gene Keady. The miracle Milan of 1954. Bob Knight – lots of Bob Knight, what with the photos and newspaper clippings and leather whip. There’s a story, that whip.

But I can’t be the one to tell it.

Dan Moon can tell that story. He’s the barber and this is his shop, and those are his memories — snapshots of the history of our state — on the walls.

Sit down in that chair over there. You might learn a thing or two. History doesn’t come free at the Cloverdale Barber Shop, but it’s close, really close. For $11 you’ll get conversation and a haircut. He’ll trim your beard at no additional cost.

You do realize, I’m telling the most famous barber in Cloverdale, you could charge more than $11.

“I got my house paid for,” he says. “Got my car paid for. Got this shop paid for. Why should I charge $12 or $13 when I’m getting by?”

Oh, there’s living, breathing Indiana history in here, and it’s not just hanging on the walls. It’s etched into Dan Moon’s face, and it’s more than basketball. Look closely at the corners of his eyes. You can see the trails carved by tears.

Those are for Margaret.

A note from Bob Knight – and a whip

Bob Knight wrote him a letter, you know. It’s up on the wall, isn’t it? And this is the truth, not one of those tales that Dan Moon likes to tell. He’ll embellish some stories and make up others, and it’s all in fun, but that letter is the real deal. And he got it from Bob Knight. Well, sort of.

“One of my customers give me that,” Moon says, and you’ll hear those words a lot today.

One of my customers …

He’s had a lot of customers. Been cutting hair 59 years, all over the state. Kokomo, Lebanon, Noblesville, Marion.

Dan Moon arrived in Cloverdale in 1980 and never left. Thirty-nine years in one spot? That’s a lot of customers, and one of them was in Bloomington back in 1997, back when Knight was the most powerful man in the state. The customer got to telling Knight about Moon, about a health issue he’d been having, about his passion for IU basketball. Knight fired off a letter that begins:

“It is my understanding that you are one of our best fans …”

The words are obscured by a leather whip, curled ominously around the letter like a rattlesnake. The whip doesn’t seem to fit among all this basketball history, but …

Wait, I’m telling Dan Moon. Is that the whip? The one Knight jokingly used on Calbert Cheaney in 1992? Dan Moon is cutting hair at the moment — the man earns his living, $11 at a time – but he looks up at me, standing under the whip, and grins. In the chair, a silver-haired man named Rodney Lynch starts grinning, too. Here comes a story.

“One of my customers brought me that,” Moon says. “He was telling Coach that I was a big IU fan, and he said Coach leaned down and opened a drawer and said, ‘Maybe he’d like this. It’s the whip I used on Calbert Cheaney.’”

Picture my eyes bulging. Hear me sputtering a single word:

Seriously?

“Nah,” Moon says. “But it’s a good story.”

Rodney Lynch is having a chuckle at that, but Moon has more to say on the subject of Coach Knight.

“He was back at IU the other day, you know. And they loved it. You know what I liked best?” Moon pauses to lean down conspiratorially, and give Rodney a wink. “Yeah, he’s rough and tough as he is, but Coach Knight wasn’t so rough and tough that he couldn’t cry.”

Which brings me back to the letter, because Knight also had been told in 1997 about some health issues Moon had been having. After mentioning the enclosed signed picture for “one of our best fans,” the letter goes from there, referencing Dan’s health and saying, “We want you to know that we are pulling for you …”

Well, you can read it yourself, next time you’re in Cloverdale. Better hurry, though. Dan Moon is retiring at the end of March. He’s 81.

Married the music teacher

Back in the day, Dan Moon was quite the athlete himself. Didn’t play basketball, not at a high level, but he competed once against Oscar Robertson of Crispus Attucks in the high jump.

A story in the Pendleton newspaper from 1958 – that story is somewhere around here – calls him “the leading factor in Pendleton’s two opening cinder triumphs,” including a tri-meet against Highland and Lapel where Moon won the high hurdles, low hurdles and high jump. He was a track star at Pendleton.

And that’s where he met Margaret.

Ms. Clark, the kids called her. She was teaching music at Pendleton in 1960, and one of her kids was a senior named Van Moon. That’s Dan’s younger brother.

“Dan,” he kept telling his older brother, “you’ve got to meet my music teacher.”

So Dan went to the school, had lunch with Van, and there she was: Ms. Clark. Dan asked her out, and took her to the Frisch’s in Anderson. They had coffee and a sandwich. They were married before the year was out.

There are memories of Margaret in the barber shop. Pictures, including the tombstone where she’s buried at Hudson Hill Cemetery in nearby Gosport. That’s a picture of Dan Moon’s final resting place, too, because the tombstone – a boulder, really – has two names: Daniel, it says. And Margaret. Between them, a heart with an arrow.

“She had a car wreck,” Dan’s saying. “I’ve got a picture here.”

He heads for the gumball machine against the wall, leans it forward, and there it is in a glass frame: A 2007 newspaper article with photos of the crumpled car and emergency personnel working to extract his wife. The wreckage was so bad, a helicopter was dispatched to take Margaret Moon to Wishard Hospital. It landed in a nearby soybean field just north of Spencer, where she’d suffered several broken bones.

“Doctors said she had a 10 percent chance of making it,” Dan says. “Well, she lived another 7½ years.”

She lived those years up the road in Greencastle, in hospitals and nursing homes. Best as he could, Dan lived those years with her. He’d close the barber shop every night at 6 and go sit with her for dinner. He closed at noon Saturdays and got up there earlier. They’d sit in the hallway outside her room, visiting.

Since Jan. 27, 2015, he has visited his wife at Hudson Hill. He shows me the tombstone, the names, the heart with the arrow. He looks away. He doesn’t want to show me the tears.

Chad Tucker, Cooper Neese, more

Dan Moon wears a belt and suspenders. Red button-down shirt, and jeans. Keys hanging from a belt loop. He’s telling me why that Purdue clock, shaped like a license plate, is mounted high on the wall, behind a small television set.

“One of my customers brought it in here,” Dan says. “He thought I needed a good clock. I kind of stuck it up there where it doesn’t get a lot of attention.”

Dan Moon has more to say on the subject, but a customer named Steve Cassell is ready with his $11, “and I got to get to this guy,” Moon’s telling me. “His wife’s waiting outside, and she makes all my pies down there. Can’t get her mad at me.”

“Down there” is Lou’s Diner, between the Super 8 motel and Value Market grocery store. Out by Interstate 70. That’s where Alice Cassell – that’s Steve’s wife – makes the best pies in town.

“They’ve got a problem,” Dan’s saying when he gets the idea I might be headed to Lou’s Diner next. “They pile too much food on your plate, and my doctor says I gotta watch what I eat.”

Heard that, I’m saying. Happens with age.

“Happens with maturity,” he says, winking at me.

He’s seen some things, Dan Moon. He saw Cooper Neese become the most beloved figure in town when he was scoring 2,496 points for Cloverdale from 2013-17. Dan Moon cut Cooper’s hair, and seeing how I know Cooper a little, I find him by text at Indiana State and ask him about Cloverdale's famous barber.

“Love him,” Cooper texts back. “Danny Moon’s been cutting hair since my dad was in size-3 toddler shoes. His grandson Brandon Moon scored 1,000 points at Cloverdale.”

Somewhere in here, near the old license plates honoring Cloverdale’s 1965 Sweet 16 team and the Final Four Clovers of 1966, near a tiny megaphone used by Cloverdale cheerleaders in 1966, is the green Indiana All-Star shirt worn by Cooper Neese in 2017.

“I’ve also got Chad Tucker,” Moon says, showing me a photo of the 1983 Cloverdale star who became Butler’s all-time leading scorer. “He still holds all the records up there.”

Up 'er, is how those last two words sound. He’s an original, Dan Moon, a self-described "country barber" who wasn’t going to retire until he found the right guy to replace him. He found him in Bryan Smith, who starts here April 1.

“Good barber,” Moon says of Smith. “Good country barber. That’s what I was looking for. I wasn’t going to sell this place to just anybody.”

His piece of Milan's miracle

One more story.

OK, that was a fib. But that happens a lot here, inside the Cloverdale Barber Shop. Two more stories, promise.

OK, maybe three.

First, Dan Moon’s career path. He didn’t grow up dreaming of being a barber. He didn’t care much for books — he says he was held back twice before reaching high school, and he’s serious about that – and he wasn’t sure what to do after graduating from Pendleton in 1958 at age 19.

“I worked in factories, this and that. I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” he says. “My daddy was a cop, and I didn’t want to do that. Didn’t want to be a lawyer – don’t like to argue. Didn’t want to be a doctor – don’t like blood and guts. But I was driving by the barber shop one day and the barber’s sitting there reading the paper and smoking a cigarette. He had a new car. I said: ‘That’s what I want to do!’”

Silly me, I’m asking him: Seriously?

“Nah,” he says with a wink. “But that’s how I like to tell it.”

He graduated from the old Indiana Barber College in Irvington in 1961, and has been cutting hair ever since. Been finding memorabilia ever since, too. Well, memorabilia seems to find him.

One of my customers …

Like that framed schedule from the 1954 Milan miracle, signed by players and cheerleaders.

“My UPS man give me that,” Moon says. “He was going to Milan all the time, and he said there was a good ol’ gal down there, just a good girl, and she had all this stuff from Milan.”

You mean Roselyn McKittrick, I’m asking Dan? She turned her collection into a museum. I knew her!

“Yeah,” he says. “Back when she bought this barber shop down there for the museum, my UPS man was telling me she needed an antique barber pole. I told him: ‘I can get you one.’ He said: ‘How much will it cost?’ I said: ‘She’s a good girl, right? Well, I got one in my garage.’”

I’m interrupting the story to ask Dan: “You’d been saving that barber pole for some reason, and you just gave it to her?”

“Well, she’s a good ol’ girl,” Dan says. “And last summer (the UPS driver) was down there, telling her I’ve got all this stuff on my walls, and she looks around and sees this 1954 Milan schedule. She took it off the wall, rolled it up and said: ‘You take it to that ol’ boy that give me that ol’ barber pole.’”

Dan adores that Milan schedule, but it isn’t his favorite item in this Indiana history museum. No, not the letter from Bob Knight or the framed front-page newspaper stories from IU’s five national championships. Not the box of Wheaties with a picture of Larry Bird on the cereal box, signed by Larry Bird himself, either. None of that, so stop guessing.

This is the final story, because Dan has work to do. He’s doing it right now, in fact, cutting Bill Davies’ hair.

“Wish I’d discovered him sooner,” Davies is saying about Dan Moon. “I was going to a ‘stylist’ in Greencastle” – Davies literally makes finger quotes, showing unspoken disdain – “and this is just my third time here. Then I found out he was retiring. I was like: ‘Crap!’”

I’m asking Davies if his kids played for Cloverdale. He shakes his head.

“My grandson did,” Moon says.

That’s right, I’m saying. I hear Brandon Moon scored 1,000 points.

“I’ve got the ball up ’er,” he says, and points to his ceiling. Sure enough, there it is in the middle of the shop: A basketball signed by his son from Jan. 29, 2000 against South Putnam. It’s in a glass case, perched on what looks like a lid from a mason jar.

“His parents were divorced by then,” Dan Moon’s telling me, “and when they stopped the game and gave him the ball, what does he do? He couldn’t run it up to his mom, and he couldn’t run it up to his dad. So he ran it up to Grandpa. He’s a good boy.”

Something in Dan Moon’s voice catches. He’s smiling, maybe more than that, but he’s looking away and that’s OK. Some memories belong to a man. Some memories he’ll take with him – to Hudson Hill, to a stone with two names and a heart.

Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/gregg.doyel.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Cloverdale's Dan Moon wears his heart on the walls of his barber shop