Sonny cut hair on 71st Street for fifty-two years. He opened the shop in 1973 with a borrowed chair and a hand-lettered sign, and he was still there on a Saturday morning last winter, sweeping up, telling somebody they were wrong about the Bears.
He learned the trade from his uncle Roy, who told him a barber is not in the hair business, he is in the people business. Sonny took that seriously. He knew who had lost a job, whose boy had made honour roll, who had not been in for a while and ought to be checked on. The chair by the window was for the men who came to sit and say nothing, and everyone understood that chair.
He never charged a child for a haircut before their school picture, and he never charged a man for one before a job interview. He did not announce this. You found out about it years later, from somebody else.
He married Delores in 1971, in her mother’s front room, and they had three children and seven grandchildren and one great-granddaughter who has his exact eyebrows. He ushered at Greater Faith on Sundays for forty years and coached Little League for nineteen, badly, with enormous enthusiasm.
He died in January, quickly, which he would have preferred. The shop was open again the following week because he had made his grandson promise. The photographs are still taped around the mirror, and nobody is taking them down.