The search is over. I’ve found my new barber. After Frank Limentato departed for Elmwood Park, I knew I wouldn’t be following him there. I need my barber local. So the next most local barber was just a few blocks down Oak Park Avenue in the Oak Park Arms Retirement Community.
Jill Wagner, program director at The Arms, after reading our extensive coverage of Frank’s departure from Oak Park, sent me a coupon for a free haircut from Emil Messina, the aforementioned barber at The Arms.
Emil is located in a tiny shop that harkens back to the days when the Oak Park Arms was a swank hotel, pretty well known in the Chicago area. Emil hasn’t been there that long, but he’s been a barber for a very long time. He grew up in central Sicily in a small town not far from where Frank Limentato grew up, so I’ve got a Sicilian string going here.
Emil’s grandfather and father were both barbers, and in those days, he explained, when it came time to make a living, you pretty much did what your father did.
“I was born in a barbershop,” he says. I assume he doesn’t mean literally, but I didn’t ask. During WWII, when he was 13 years old, he started giving haircuts to the invading American G.I.s, and he’s been cutting hair ever since.
For several decades he plied his trade in the lower level of the Palmer House in Chicago’s Loop. He’s been here for the last 23 years and now lives in Westchester.
“You don’t get rich cutting hair,” he says, “but you make a living.”
He works Wednesday through Saturday, but the best thing about Emil is he takes appointments. I waltzed in without one a few Saturdays back and found Marty Noll, CEO of Community Bank, awaiting his turn. In the chair was P.J. O’Dea of Ennis, County Clare, Ireland, who promptly gave me his card and told me not to call him. With clients like this, I figured, how could I lose?
Emil told me to come back at 2:30 and he’d take care of me. It was worth the wait.
Nice to have a new barber, but he’s older than Frank. Who knows how long he’ll be around?