After slicing hair for 50 years, Frank Moretti is able to retire

FERGUS – Frank Moretti has spent greater than 50 years slicing hair, 30 of these from his second-storey barbershop overlooking St. Andrew Avenue.

And on Might 20, he’s bidding farewell to Fergus. 

Moretti’s for Males will shut and Frank, who’s 80, will retire. 

Reducing hair, it appears, is in his household’s genetic make-up.

Frank and his three brothers all wound up within the hair enterprise, working collectively for a time and individually for a very long time.

After attending barber college in Toronto within the Nineteen Sixties, Frank began working in his cousin’s barbershop in Guelph when he graduated.

There he gained information and expertise so as to add to his coaching.

His brother Peter, who was courting a lady in Fergus (she later turned Peter’s spouse), talked about {that a} new plaza was being inbuilt Fergus.

“Fergus was nonetheless a small city again then – 3,000 or 4,000 folks,” mentioned Frank. 

“There have been only some barbers and most of them had been able to retire.”

The brothers noticed a possibility and opened Highland Barber Store in that plaza in 1969. 

Ten years later, they purchased a home on Tower Avenue the place all 4 brothers – Frank, Peter, Randy and Dario – operated a hair salon together with their brother-in-law Kevin. 

“It was all within the household,” Frank joked.   

There they minimize males’s hair on the bottom flooring and girls’s hair upstairs.  

In 1987, Randy and Peter opened their very own companies in Guelph and Frank and Dario moved to 169 St. Andrew St. 

“I by no means minimize girls’s hair, simply males’s – in order that’s when it turned a barber store,” Frank mentioned.

Dario left some years later, “so I’ve been alone for 30 years,” he added.

A few of his shoppers have been with him for 50 years. Some introduced their very own youngsters after which their grandkids.

Frank recalled when Peter Marucci, a neighborhood author and magician, determined to chop off his hair in assist of a most cancers fundraiser.

Frank shaved his head, the press was there, and when it was completed, he handed Marucci a sucker – “Like I did for the youngsters, after they had been good.”

He pulled a body from a drawer with a group of photographs from that occasion. One confirmed Marucci bursting into laughter when handed the sucker. 

“That’s a great reminiscence,” Frank mentioned. “I’ll preserve that.” 

His perch over St. Andrew Avenue was an awesome spot for watching the Santa Claus parade and he’d invite prospects to convey their youngsters and grandkids to look at from inside. 

For years his prospects would drop in, shoot the breeze, and remedy the world’s issues whereas ready for a minimize. 

That’s why he’s saved working so lengthy. 

“These guys had been my pals. To me they had been my household,” he mentioned.

“If I labored in a manufacturing unit, I most likely would have retired at 65. However this was like a social membership – the jokes, the coffees. I type of miss that.” 

COVID-19 compelled Frank to modify to cuts by appointment, so it’s a quiet place nowadays.

He scaled again his hours to 4 days every week, but it surely’s nonetheless so much for him to work from 8am to 6pm and commute from Guelph, the place he lives. 

“I didn’t have a interest. What was I going to do?” he mentioned of working long gone the time most individuals retire.

“However now I need to spend time with my spouse (Connie), my two boys (Mark and Jamie) and my granddaughter (Sofia). That little lady is all the things to me.”

However earlier than he goes, Frank’s planning an open home on Might 20, with refreshments and the prospect to meet up with outdated pals and shoppers, and to thank the group for offering him with a great residing and a great life. 

Particulars of that occasion can be introduced nearer to the date.

“I simply need to thank everybody,” he mentioned.

“I by no means had any regrets. This city has been good to me.”