Al Leonetti swung open the glass door to Sorci’s Barber Shop for
the umpteenth time on a recent afternoon.
Al Leonetti swung open the glass door to Sorci’s Barber Shop for the umpteenth time on a recent afternoon.
He waited a few minutes as proprietor John Sorci put the finishing touches on another client, Paul Bolino.
Sorci wheeled around Bolino in a rickety black leather stool – bad knees – chatting about Bolino’s father, who had been sick.
Sorci finished with him and they shook hands.
Leonetti shuffled over from the waiting area and into the sturdy barber chair in Sorci’s one-room shop at 135 W. Main Ave.
Leonetti took out his salmon colored hearing aids and set them on a small counter before him. He set back and closed his eyes as Sorci got to work.
Skillfully, he snipped and combed, snipped and combed. They chatted about this and that – notable local Janice Perlitch’s recent death, for example – as Sorci worked.
Leonetti said he liked Sorci’s personality, and his shop is “a place to come to chew the fat.”
But not a word was exchanged between Leonetti and Sorci, both former mayors of Morgan Hill, about hair.
Hair is possibly the least common topic of conversation inside Morgan Hill’s traditional barber shops, where men gather to gossip and gladhand in the comfort of a second home.
“John knows what I like,” Bolino said. He’s been going to Sorci’s about six years. “I know John. He’s really comfortable, got a good atmosphere. I don’t have to tell him how to do it.”
Barbers are cut from the same cloth. They’re outgoing and gentle, the kind of men other men are comfortable spending time with.
The California Economic Development Department lists active listening, speaking and social perceptiveness as the top three skills used in the job. The department estimates about 5,400 barbers work in California; about 10 of them work in Morgan Hill.
Many get into the field through a family member and over the decades, as their profession progresses, the men and their loyal clients grow old together and watch as times change, children age, sports teams and politicians win and lose and hairstyles come and go.
Older barbers like Sorci remember the profession’s dark days: the ’70s.
“That’s when the hippies came in,” Sorci said, smiling. That’s what brought him to Morgan Hill. He’d barbered in Los Altos since 1963 – his father wanted him to take over the family’s apricot farm; but he had other plans.
“I was intrigued with it, the cleanliness of it, the conversations we have,” Sorci said. Sorci took a break from cutting hair, and bought a liquor store in Morgan Hill in 1976 to wait out the shaggy-haired fad.
Soon enough he was cutting hair again. Barbering is alive and well in Morgan Hill and not just with the older crowd.
Francisco Quintana, 28, has visited gregarious barber Ruben Herrera at Bondi’s Barber Shop at 16330 Monterey Road 52 times a year for the past nine years.
Though his buzz cut could take just five minutes, Quintana spends an hour with Herrera, talking about the past week and the week to come.
“It’s the atmosphere. I’m just here to B.S. with him,” Quintana said. Quintana said he sometimes goes to other salons when Herrera visits Mexico, his home country, but he prefers Bondi’s. Owned by Sam Bondi, the shop boasts a traditional spinning barber pole out front and a weathered wooden sign showing hours of operation as 1 to 8 p.m., though neither Bondi nor Herrera stick to that schedule.
Still, Herrera prefers the laid back shop, with its table strewn with men’s magazines like Maxim, to the more fast-paced salons.
“You’re just a number to them,” Quintana said. “They have to write your name down because they don’t know it already. I don’t have the same connection. This is male bonding time.”
Joe Acosta has owned the Morgan Hill Barber Shop at 9 W. First St. for 13 years.
“My customers here are very loyal. They’re friends in the sense that they get to know you. You get old together,” Acosta said.
Acosta has a baseball cap collection that includes souvenirs from Australia among other far-flung places, brought in by his clients.
Acosta said his clients look out for him. The week of Christmas, he suffered a herniated disc in his back and had to turn several waiting customers away one day. Two weeks later, those customers came back, with their hair that much longer. They’d waited for his return.
Acosta, in fact, has customers that were passed on to him from the late Charlie Powell, who operated the downtown shop for 50 years before his death 13 years ago.
“You’re never going to get rich cutting hair,” Acosta said. “But I have been cutting, 33 years of cutting their hair.”
And the younger generation is coming up behind the veteran barbers. In addition to Quintana, Dan Dixon, 41, just got his license a month ago and is working at Main Street Barber Shop, owned by Tim Rose. Dixon, who recently divorced, sold his home and the business he owned – It’s a Grind coffee house in Gilroy – and is now cutting hair for a living, and enjoying it.
“It’s something I always wanted to,” said Dixon, who hopes to open his own shop in Morgan Hill later this year.
“It’s stable and in need,” he added. “Guys between 30 and 80 don’t really want salons and the barbers we have here like Sorci and Acosta are in their 60s and 70s and we’re going to need others to take over someday.”
Men who enjoy the quaintness of a barbershop can rest assured. There’s a place in Morgan Hill to get your hair cut, and chew the fat.
