Count

Americanization is a splendid thing. Out of young immigrants it produces Secretary J. J. Davis' Editor Boks, Physicist Pupins. But there was an old school of immigrants who resisted Americanization while they contributed with varying degrees of importance, richness and intimacy to the life of the country. Last week a reporter for the New York Evening Post found a member of that school and told his story.

He came from Italy some 40 years ago, Carlo Salvatore Cicero, with shears and razors; a barber, aged 16. He found work in the old Astor House and ran a shop of his own in Pearl Street after hours. It was a heyday of whiskers; one's pompadour was as important as one's politics.

One customer was troublesome. He jumped and jerked in the chair; insisted on reading a newspaper even when Carlo's razor was whizzing around his bellicose mustache. But Carlo never cut him and watched him rise from police commissioner to governor to President Theodore Roosevelt.

Another customer would chatter away in Italian, confide an impresario's worries over people of temperament--and Carlo can still have a seat at the Metropolitan whenever he wants one--compliments of Signer Gatti-Casazza.

Mr. Cicero is called 'The Count" by his colleagues, for his tales of former glory. He frequently shaved "Gentleman Jim" Corbett, John L. Sullivan, Governor Whitman, William A. Brady. Charles M. Schwab, Andrew Carnegie, George Young* and scores more preferred him to all barbers. Publisher Govin of the Journal of Commerce took him abroad as private barber and interpreter, later helping him start a mineral-water.

The War ruined Mr. Cicero's water business. He went to Italy and joined the Secret Service. Much of the pompous society he served had dissolved when he returned to Manhattan. He took up his cutlery and went to work again in the inelegant, workaday Evening Post Building. But still his old customers seek him out, and the subject of his greatest achievement still flourishes.

It was a sharp evening in December, 1888, "The Count" remembers. Into his Pearl Street shop came a rising young barrister for whose pompadour and mustache Manhattan already entertained an admiration that was to grow and grow as the barrister matured and developed a beard. The gentleman was quite excited. He was, he said, to be married in the morning. Carlo Salvator Cicero and no one else must come to his house after breakfast. Mr. Cicero went. He whetted his blade, he whipped his lather, he wielded scissors, comb and brush to achieve the acme of tonsorial impeccability the masterpiece of a career. He finished with a gesture--and Charles Evans Hughes, pleased, handed him $20.

*No relation to the swimmer of the Catalina Channel (TIME, Jan. 24), Mr. Young, banker, married the famed singer, Lillian Nordica.