HOLLYWOOD — The shop had two chairs, but Amos Trafford only ever worked one of them, and the second stood empty for so many years that regulars used it as a place to set their hats.

Mr. Trafford, who cut hair a short walk from the Wiltern at Wilshire and Western for fifty-one years, died January 6 at his home in the Mid-Wilshire district. He was 87. A grandson said he died in his sleep.

The barbershop, which he named simply Trafford’s, opened in 1969 in a narrow storefront and changed almost nothing after that. Prices rose, reluctantly and with apology. The magazines aged on the rack. Men who came in as boys for their first haircut brought their own boys, and later stood on the sidewalk out front introducing grandsons to the man who had cut three generations of the same family’s hair.

Amos Trafford was born in Marshall, Texas, in 1937, one of seven children, and learned to cut hair in the Army, where a talent for it kept him out of worse duty. He came to Los Angeles in 1961, worked in other men’s shops until he could afford his own, and then never worked for anyone again.

What he sold, his customers said, was not really the haircut. “You went to Amos to be known,” said Preston Vandal, who sat in that chair once a month for thirty years. “He remembered your wife’s name, your team, the surgery you were nervous about. He’d been holding scissors near your ears the whole time and you never felt it. The haircut was just the reason you were allowed to keep coming back.”

He kept the shop open six days a week until his knees gave out, then five, then three, cutting more slowly but refusing to quit. He distrusted the newer places on the boulevards that called themselves grooming lounges and charged accordingly. A haircut, he held, should cost about what a decent lunch cost, and a man should leave feeling looked after, not upsold.

Trafford outlasted most of the block’s other original businesses and watched the neighborhood turn over around him more than once. He was, by the accounts of those who knew him, entirely without bitterness about it, treating each new tenant next door as a person who might eventually need a haircut.

He is survived by two daughters, Cynthia Trafford of Los Angeles and Beverly Odom of Las Vegas; five grandchildren; eight great-grandchildren; and a younger brother, Ellis, in Texas. His wife, Della, died in 2016.

His family plans to keep the hand-lettered sign, the one that read TRAFFORD’S — HAIRCUTS with no further explanation, because none had ever been needed. The chair, worn to the shape of the work, is going to the grandson who spent Saturdays sweeping the floor beneath it, and who says he does not intend to sit in it so much as keep it.