Vito Damiani, of Mr. Vito Men’s Hair Designers, gives a massage to Boca resident Jerry Martin.
Photos by Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
‘Fonzi’ Palmieri trims Alexandra Pena (left) at Colby’s Barber Shop in Ocean Ridge. Shop owner
Lino Marmorato (center) with Joe Giuliano of Boynton Beach and Paul Hansen with customer Ken Keller of Hypoluxo.
INSET: The barber pole shines brightly in front of Colby’s Barber Shop.
BELOW LEFT: Brad Elliott gives a haircut to Jake Julien, 7,
a student at Gulf Steam School, at Fifth Avenue Barber Shop in Delray Beach.
By Ron Hayes
Take a chair, please, sit back and relax, while we salute the red, white and blue.
No need to stand this time. No hand on heart.
The red is for blood, the white for bandages, the blue for veins.
Swirl them all together in a triple helix and you’ve got the old-fashioned barber pole, once as ubiquitous as Old Glory itself, but not, alas, as enduring.
Dating back to the Middle Ages, when barbers were also surgeons — hence the blood and bandages — the barber pole has gone from common to quaint.
Nowadays we have Supercuts and unisex, salons, stylists and, that bane of barbers everywhere, the Wahl’s do-it-yourself home haircutting kit.
And yet they survive, real barbers — from the Latin barba for “beard” — and real barber shops, with fishing and hunting magazines by the door, Clubman after-shave in the air, and manly chitchat to go with the scissors’ clip-clip. And, of course, a barber pole.
Meet Lino
On the mirror above his chair at Colby’s Barber Shop in Ocean Ridge, Pasqualino Marmorato has placed a small sign to introduce “Your Barber Lino (Lee-no).”
“A barber pole says, ‘This is a real barber shop,’” Lino says, as Il Volo sings Volare on a portable CD player nearby. “You go to a beauty parlor, they don’t put this in the window.”
Lino’s barber pole is prominently displayed in his shop window. It’s electric, it lights up, it spins. It’s been there since the shop opened in 1996.
“Back in New Jersey, I had a seven-foot, ceramic pole that weighed almost 100 pounds,” he remembers. “It was outside, and another, smaller one was on the roof. But then the town got wilder with the kids, so I moved it in.”
Lino is from Pizzo, a small seaport nestled in the instep of Italy’s boot. He is 70, and he has been cutting hair for 60 years.
“But I started when I was 5,” he says, “sweeping up in my father’s shop. By the time I was 10, I was already behind a chair. We had a neighbor who was a carpenter, and he built a stool for me to stand on so I could reach their heads.”
In those days, a haircut cost you 10 cents. He gets $15 now, $18 for long hair.
When he was 16, his father retired, and Lino took over the shop. At 18, he joined the Costa cruise line, spent 10 years cutting hair while sailing back and forth across the Atlantic, then switched to the Caribbean routes out of Miami.
After 22 years in Lyndhurst, N.J., he returned to Florida in 1996, managed Colby’s for 17 years, and bought it six months ago. He’s seen the styles come and go — long in the ’60s, perms in the ’70s, mid-length in the ’80s. And he’s heard it all, too.
“I’ve had customers tell me things they wouldn’t tell their wives,” he says. ‘’My father was the same way. His friends spent more time in the shop than they did with their families, telling their problems.”
These days, he gets requests for the Kojak look. Shave it all off. Only the vain dye their hair, he says.
And who’s most vain?
“Middle-aged men. Late 40s, early 50s. More vain than women. They’re going through this change, you know …”
Meet Vito
Down in Boca Raton, Vito Damiani calls his shop in the Stonegate Plaza “Mr. Vito’s Men’s Hair Design.” But he’s not fooling anyone.
The city won’t let him put a barber pole outside, so Vito’s hung a stained glass rendering in the window.
Andrea Bocelli singing low in the background, Field & Stream by the counter, a framed print of a 19th-century “Tonsorial Parlor” on the wall and, just above that, a treasured gift from his grandchildren: A sign that says “Papa’s Barbershop.”
This is a barbershop, and he’s an old-fashioned barber.
Vito grew up in Pisticci, about 30 miles south of Naples.
“I started out hanging around the barber shop as a cleanup boy. I did my first haircut when I was 11½,” he says, “and when I was 15, I started riding my bike to house calls.”
At 17, he arrived in Brooklyn. He could cut hair, but he couldn’t speak English. He got a job in two weeks.
In 1963, he was drafted on his birthday, and became a U.S. citizen 10 days before leaving for Vietnam.
“In New York, we did some crazy cuts,” he recalls, “and then the Beatles came along and changed everything. I was in the army then, and when I came home — oh, my goodness.”
His philosophy of barbering is simple: “Know your business, take care of your customers — and keep your mouth shut.”
Bad barbers don’t listen, he says. You have to listen for the haircut your customer wants, not the haircut you think he should have.
“I hear family problems, financial problems, but that’s confidential — unless it’s a funny story. We talk sports and family. Politics and religion are not discussed in my chair.”
Now, about toupees …
He smiles. “Even the best, I can tell. I had one customer who had three toupees. Short, medium and long. He’d change them so people would think his hair was growing.”
In the shop window, near the stained-glass barber pole, hangs an American flag.
“I’m the American Dream,” Vito says. “When I go to work in the morning, I don’t feel like I’m going to work.”
Meet Brad
Not all old-fashioned barbers are Italian, and they’re not all 70, either.
Brad Elliott, owner of the 5th Avenue Barber Shop in Delray Beach, is 39, born and raised in Johnstown, Pa.
His mother and grandmother cut hair. His father was a coal miner.
“I was kind of a wild kid,” he says, “so when the coal mines shut down I was either going to go to beauty school or go to jail.”
He trained at Rinaldo’s Barber Shop in College Station, Pa., home of Penn State University.
“I wasn’t really college material,” he says, “but I was the barber to all the frat boys and football players, so I got invited to their parties.”
In 1997, he arrived in Florida, worked in Boca Raton and Boynton Beach, and opened his own shop in February 2012.
The barber pole by the sidewalk is portable because the city code won’t let him have a permanent one. He made it himself from PVC pipe and brings it in at night. Inside, however, a genuine 1922 pole rotates on the wall beside his chairs.
“I like old,” he says. “I just bought a 1932 Ford Roadster, and I love the doo-wop songs.”
Instead of Italian tenors, Brad The Barber plays the oldies stations — Don McLean singing American Pie, for example. If Lino and Vito strive for a more conservative Old World ambiance, Brad The Barber is looser, more candid, more American Pie.
“Oh, the kids!” he says. “We charge them $20, same as an adult, because sometimes they’re a moving target. But I try to become their friend, see. I never say, ‘I’m gonna cut your hair.’ Cut’s a scary word when you’re a kid. I say, ‘I’m gonna give you a trim.’ It works.”
Brad the Barber is young, and his business is young, but his dream is to own something old. Not a hair salon, but a genuine barber shop, the kind of place where men gather to socialize and a good haircut is only part of the appeal.
“I was meant to be a barber,” he says. “A barber’s like a bartender, except our customers are sober.”
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