IMMIGRATION: Frank's Barber Shop | TIME

Francesco Marinosci was only 17 when he left his home in Italy and set out for America. He was a sensible boy, but crossing the Atlantic was a great adventure, and, in the back of his mind, he looked for wonders in America. “That was 40 years ago,” he said last week in his Bronx barber shop. “So long it seems like a dream.”

The little shop, with its shabby furniture, its smiling calendar nude and its big, faded poster of Rudolph Valentino, bore eloquent testimony to Francesco’s low-key adventure in America. He had been swallowed up by the great city. Day after day he had stood beside a barber chair, clipping hair, shaving jowls. The 40 years had passed. Francesco? Nobody!

A Letter from Italy. Nevertheless, a few people in Italy remembered Francesco, and at the end of World War II he was pleased to get a letter from Francavilla Fontana, his struggling home town on the featureless plain of Brindisi. The letter was from a family with ten children, so desperately poor that they were reduced to clothing themselves with paper bags. Francesco did not know them, and furthermore his shop was making only $15 a week. But, he reflected, his wife was making good wages at a ladies’ belt factory; on re-reading the letter he could not help exclaiming: “Povere condicione—such poor conditions!” He sent $20 and four packages of clothing.

After that more letters came—first from Francavilla Fontana, later from Naples, Salerno, Milan, Bologna, Trieste. “You gotta cry,” Francesco told his customers. “They’re all alike. All in bad shape. I wonder, how could the authorities let this happen? But I can’t make no distinguish . . .” Patiently, month after month, Francesco mailed out packages of food in clothing. Sometimes he sent cash—”whatever we can spare.”

Each year, the letters multiplied. They came by the dozen, then the score, then by the hundreds. All over Italy, it seemed, people knew of “Frank’s Barber Shop, 629 Westchester Ave., The Bronx, New York, U.S.A.” Francesco toiled to answer them. To get old clothes he plagued his friends, neighbors, customers, the men at the station house; he haunted Salvation Army stores and the Jewish thrift shop. He sent every cent he could possibly spare.

Packages from New York. By last week Francesco had mailed 1,200 big, square packages, each carefully sewn up in cheesecloth to discourage pilferers. But there were more than 500 letters piled in boxes in the barber shop last week and more coming every day. “If I had the money I’ve spent on these letters the last few years,” he says, “I could retire now. My friends tell me to quit. But what you gonna do? If you have the heart for it, you can do anything.”

Whether Francesco knew it or not, his heart had made his old dreams come true. In a dozen Italian cities and towns he was a Famous American. A TIME correspondent who visited Francavilla Fontana last week was overwhelmed by testimonials for Francesco. His brother wept at mention of his name. “Who would ever have thought that through shaving beards my brother would have become our man of Providence?” The parish priest spoke of him in terms once reserved for the nobility: “Blessings to Don Francesco.” Nuns at two orphanages he has helped support talked almost as if he were a saint. But it was the ordinary villagers who made it certain that Francesco had become a hero; they referred to him with awe as Il Re del Maquillage della Bontd—The King of Bartering Goodness.

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