SILVER SPRING -- Rozier Carter rushes into the Electric Shaver Shop of Maryland, a five-o'clock shadow on his face and a 1983 Remington in his hand. "I had a helluva time finding this place," he pants.
Peering out from behind the counter, Charles A. McKean proclaims in a deadpan voice: "That's because there ain't no other place like this place."
The Electric Shaver Shop, a sliver of a store at 8211 Fenton St. in downtown Silver Spring, is a specialty shop nonpareil. Mr. McKean and his daughter not only repair your shaver while you wait, but also display about 250 electric shavers dating to the early 1930s.
"I've got every Schick that was ever made," Mr. McKean declares.
The breathless Mr. Carter, 79, after discovering the shop in the yellow pages, drove 45 minutes from his home near Upper Marlboro to get here. He's used an electric shaver for 60 years and wants to hold onto his 12-year-old Remington, he says.
"Where else can you get an old shaver serviced?" says Mr. Carter, looking around, beginning to notice the antique shavers in display cases.
"Geez," he says, finally, "this is an unusual place."
Mr. McKean, 70, opened the Electric Shaver Shop in 1956 after working eight years for the Schick company in Washington. He opened four other service centers in Washington and Virginia, but this one in Silver Spring is the last of his line.
As a service man and then service manager for Schick, Mr. McKean grew fond of the small whirring motors and the snug fit dTC of a shapely shaver in his hand. He began saving the older Schicks that customers traded in for new models.
He not only squirreled away Schicks but also Remingtons, Norelcos, Sunbeams, Ronsons, Eltrons and Brauns. Customers gave him old shavers, even willed them to him. Each brand has its own display case, but there's space in the small shop for only about half of Mr. McKean's collection.
Packed away are four original Schicks that Mr. McKean says Col. Jacob Schick himself may have manufactured in his garage in 1929 or 1930. Colonel Schick, retired from the Army, patented the first successful electric razor in 1928 and began marketing it in 1931.
But before 1931, Mr. McKean says, the retired colonel made shavers at his New England home and sold them himself.
"You'd have to put a $10,000 price on each of them," says Mr. McKean of the heavy shavers that still work today. "There are no others, as far as I know."
Elliot Sivowitch, a museum specialist in the Division of Electricity and Modern Physics at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, says he knows of no others either.
Mr. Sivowitch says someone gave the museum 155 electric shavers about 20 years ago. They date from the early 1930s to the early 1960s. That's pretty much the extent of the Smithsonian's shaver collection, he says. "We've heard about some toaster collections recently, and even collections of electric fans," Mr. Sivowitch says. "But electric shavers? Maybe they're a little too esoteric."
That's not the case in Stamford, Conn., Colonel Schick's hometown and site of his first factory. Linda Baulsir, director of the Stamford Historical Society, says the society has an extensive collection of Schick shavers dating to the late 1930s. But she says it doesn't include the earliest ones.
Neither she nor Mr. Sivowitch had heard of the Electric Shaver Shop. Tucked between a locksmith and a shoe-repair store, it caters to a steady stream of customers, nearly all older men. A notable exception was Lady Bird Johnson, who walked in when the store in Washington was still open and her husband was vice president. She handed Mr. McKean three Ronson shavers.
Mr. McKean recalls that she said: "Lyndon wants to have them serviced. And he wants a carton of pre-shave."
She returned a couple of times, Mr. McKean says, until her husband became president. Then Secret Service agents brought his Ronsons. Agents earlier had dropped off President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Norelco.
Mr. McKean and his daughter Linda Wilson haven't serviced presidents' shavers since LBJ -- as far as they know. What about President Clinton?
"He probably uses a blade," Mrs. Wilson says.
The Electric Shaver Shop is now almost exclusively in Mrs. Wilson's hands. Her father "retired" to Delaware about 10 years ago and comes back just a few days each month to give her time off.
Of his three children, all daughters, Mrs. Wilson was the only one interested in shavers. Now 44, she says: "I can't picture myself doing anything else. I never get tired of it."
She services and repairs shavers, recharges batteries and sells new shavers and related merchandise six days a week. The store's motto: "If it's for electric shaving, we have it."