He still doesn’t take this country for granted

Frank the Barber-no relation to my previous hair-cutting specialist, John the Barber, or the one before that, George the Barber-recently marked an anniversary. He arrived in this country from his native Sicily 40 years ago last week.

Frank Limentato operates the “Avenue Barber Shop” according to a very unpretentious sign in the front window at 125 S. Oak Park Ave., just four storefronts up the street from Wednesday Journal. That would make him most convenient-if he weren’t so busy. As one of a dwindling number of old-fashioned barbers in Oak Park, he works pretty much non-stop five long days a week, Tuesday through Saturday.

When I need a haircut, which, in my advanced stage of hairlessness is only three or four times a year, I peer in as I pass the shop, sometimes for several weeks, until I catch him without a backlog of customers-though barbershops are one of the few places where I don’t mind waiting.

Frank runs a no-frills operation. He owes his decor mostly to old calendar photos, accented by remnants of a nautical theme that may have been inherited from the previous owner. He doesn’t need stylish trappings and neither do his customers. But he does have that classic barbershop powder, which still qualifies as one of the great smells of life.

He also has the requisite news magazines, newspapers and Sports Illustrateds and the chairs are comfortable. He’s got a coat rack and a boot-shaped umbrella stand. There are three swivel chairs, but only one ever gets used. I asked him if he was ever tempted to switch to one of the others occasionally just for a change of pace, but he just smiled his shy smile and shook his head.

The price of haircuts has gone up over the years, but at $16, I expect it’s still a bargain. You don’t come to a barbershop looking for something fancy, but Frank is very thorough. After four decades, he doesn’t sleepwalk through his clip jobs. In fact, he’s a bit of a perfectionist. There’s something comforting, even therapeutic, about being “groomed” by people who know what they’re doing.

It’s also pleasant to listen to the snippets of conversation that pass between Frank and his customers-very easy-going, nothing particularly deep or revealing, just unpretentious men exchanging everyday pleasantries.

Frank retains his strong Sicilian accent. He was born in 1943 in a mountain village of 5,000 or so in the center of the island. You’ll recall 1943 was a pretty wild time in the Mediterranean. The allies invaded Sicily that July, but Frank says the World War II pretty much went around them, and he was too young to remember anyway. I don’t know how long it took the island to recover, but things must have been pretty lean during his childhood. By 1968, he was ready to leave and try his luck in a new world.

And what a wild time he chose to come to the States. He arrived just after the King and Kennedy assassinations and the race riots, and just before the Democratic Convention riots. But four decades later, he still sees everything with an immigrant’s eye. Even when things are bad here, he notes, they were, and often are, much worse elsewhere. It’s a good country, he testifies, if you’re willing to work hard, and you’re free to do what you want, go where you want to go. Forty years later, he doesn’t take any of that for granted.

Frank was the first in his family to come over-also the last. That couldn’t have been easy. But he established himself, got married, raised a family, lives now in the western suburbs. He’s got to be thinking about retirement, but what will his customers do?

He returns to visit Sicily from time to time, and the family makes a big deal about it. Sometimes family members visit him over here. He grew up a soccer fan, but now he’s a Cub fan and enjoys going to Wrigley Field once or twice a year. The game was on TV as I got my hair cut last Thursday.

I heard from my former barber, John Grabowski, recently. John’s been retired several years now and called in after we asked readers for memories of local grocery stores. John, who lives in North Riverside, casually mentioned he’d been through a couple of surgeries to open his carotid arteries. Everything’s fine now, he said.

John the Barber, of course, was known for amassing an amazing collection of lapel buttons, pinned to a massive corkboard covering one wall of his shop next to Gilchrist Hardware, near Scoville and Madison, where he plied his shears for over 50 years. He was hoping to donate that collection to the Historical Society. Don’t know if it actually happened, but at the rate barbershops are disappearing, the Historical Society may need to put together an exhibit-just to recreate the experience for those unlucky enough to grow up too late.