In my earliest memories of getting a professional haircut, probably sometime in the mid-1940s, there were two barbers in Nassau. Lou’s barbershop was on Chatham Street, just a little south of Albany Avenue. I remember that he was a quiet man, and my father took me there only a couple of times. The shop closed abruptly in the late 1940s because Lou cut some customer’s hair completely off, and shortly after that, he was committed to a mental institution where he later died.
The other barbershop was run by Joe Sauca, a very outgoing Italian man who had a shop on the south side of Albany Avenue, just east of Alice and Artie’s bar. That shop had two chairs, although for many years only Joe worked there. When my father took me for a haircut, he also got his own haircut and a shave. It was very common then to have the barber shave men, although I never really understood why since the men shaved themselves the rest of the time. Shaving involved a ritual: After the haircut, Joe would take a hot damp towel and completely cover his customer’s face with the barber’s chair in a semi-reclined position. While initially, Joe used shaving soap in a cup lathered up with a shaving brush, I believe that the practice eventually ended for sanitary reasons, since the brush went from customer to customer. The shaving brush was replaced with a black electric machine that spewed a rich hot lather. After Joe shaved his customer with a straight razor, which he frequently stropped on long belts of leather attached to the chair, the remaining lather was washed away with the towel, and bay rum liberally applied by hand over the customer’s face.
In June 1953, Joe died at the age of 41. He was on vacation in Maryland and was fishing on a bridge with his wife. When a gust of wind blew a package of fish hooks into the roadway, he attempted to retrieve it but was struck by a passing truck and sustained fatal injuries. Joe’s son, Chuck Sauca, dropped out of high school and enrolled in a barber training course. After a few months, Chuck got his barber’s license and ran the shop for several years. As a teenage barber, he didn’t always use great judgment and infuriated one mother when he gave her son a “Mohawk” haircut.
Chuck died in his late 40s of natural causes, and the shop was sold.
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