Dean Martin Saw A Marshal Padlock His Own Barber’s Shop In Reno In 1955 — Then He Paid Cash D

The chain hit the door of Ferretti’s barber shop at 8:44 in the morning. The padlock swinging loose on the last link, and the sound of it carried all the way to the corner of Virginia Street where a man in a gray wool overcoat had just turned into Ferris Alley with his hands in his pockets and his hat pulled against the November cold coming off the Truckee River.

Wait, because what happened on this alley on a Tuesday morning in November of 1955 was seen by three people, written down by one of them, and kept in almost total silence for 40 years. The man who finally told it said he had waited that long because he wasn’t sure anyone would believe that a famous man could walk down a back alley in Reno and have nobody know who he was.

What he understood later was that the not knowing was exactly the point. Reno, Nevada. November 1955. Ferris Alley ran one block between Virginia Street and Center Street, two blocks east of the Truckee River, and most people who lived in Reno walked past the entrance to it every day without ever turning in.

The alley was not much, a row of narrow storefronts pressed between brick walls, a wooden sidewalk that had been repaired so many times the boards were all different colors, a single street lamp that came on at dusk and went off whenever it felt like it. But at the far end, where the alley bent slightly toward the river, there was a barber shop with a red and white pole, faded now, the white gone cream, and a hand-lettered sign above the door that had been there since 1923.

Ferretti’s. The letters were black on white, and whoever had painted them had taken their time. The man in the gray wool overcoat turned into the alley from Virginia Street at 8:47 in the morning. He was 38 years old. He had not shaved in two days. He wore a plain felt hat pulled low and his collar up against the November cold coming off the river.

And he walked with his hands in his coat pockets and his eyes on the far end of the alley. He was in Reno for four days performing at the Mapes Hotel on Virginia Street. A standing engagement he had kept three times in the last four years. He had been walking this particular alley since the first Reno booking had brought him here and through that barber shop door.

He knew the pole. He knew the sign. He knew the bell that rang when the door opened. The particular sound of that bell. The way it was slightly higher in pitch than any other bell on any other door he had ever pushed open anywhere. He was halfway down the alley when he saw the marshal.

Nobody recognizes him yet and that matters because everything that follows depends on it. The marshal, a heavy-set man in a county uniform, perhaps 50. The kind of face that has delivered bad news enough times to have learned to make it look like paperwork was standing at the door of Ferretti’s with a padlock in his hand.

Not a small padlock, a large one. Black iron. The kind that says this is permanent. A man in a dark suit stood beside him, younger with a briefcase. The building company’s representative there to witness the enforcement and initial the paperwork. The marshal had the chain looped once through the door handle. He had not closed it yet.

He was looking at something through the glass. The man in the gray overcoat slowed his pace. He did not stop. He kept walking toward the door at the same unhurried pace. And he looked at what the marshal was looking at through the glass. Inside, behind the barber’s chair, an old man was standing with his back to the door.

White jacket, white hair. His hands were at his sides. He was looking at the wall, at something on the wall, a photograph or a calendar or perhaps nothing at all, perhaps just the wall itself, which is what men look at when they are trying to hold themselves together and there is nothing useful to hold on to.

The man in the overcoat looked at this for a moment, then he pushed the door open and went in. Look at the room because the details matter. Ferretti’s Barber Shop was 12 ft wide and perhaps 30 ft deep. Two chairs, only one still in use, the red leather worn smooth on the armrests. The chrome foot pedal polished from 40 years of use.

A long mirror behind the chair and along the mirror’s base a row of glass bottles. Bay Rum, witch hazel, talcum powder in a green tin. Each one in the same position it had occupied since 1923. As best as Angelo Ferretti could remember. A small wooden bench along one wall for waiting.

A coat rack by the door with two hooks, one of which held a man’s winter coat that was not Angelo’s. A radio on the shelf above the mirror, a brown Bakelite box not playing. Angelo had not turned it on that morning. A photograph on the wall to the left of the mirror. Two men in army uniforms, one of them clearly younger, in front of a building somewhere in southern Italy.

The year written in pencil at the bottom, 1944. Angelo Ferretti heard the bell and turned. He was 64 years old. White hair, white jacket. The jacket pressed that morning by his wife Lucia, who had pressed it every morning for 31 years from the apartment above the shop. And who that morning had pressed it without knowing it might be the last time because Angelo had not told her.

He had not been able to tell her. Lucia’s heart had been giving her trouble for 18 months and the doctor bills had been coming in since the spring, and the decision not to tell her that the shop was in trouble had been made sometime in June and had not been revisited since. Some decisions, once made, are held in place not by certainty but by the daily impossibility of undoing them.

Angelo looked at the man in the gray overcoat. The man looked back at him. “Buongiorno,” Angelo said. His voice was steady. He had decided that morning, before the marshal arrived, that he would be steady. It was the last thing he could control, and he intended to control it. “Buongiorno,” the man said. Something moved in Angelo’s face.

A small thing, a recognition that went deeper than the face. The way a man’s expression shifts when he hears his own language come back at him from a direction he did not expect, at a moment when he did not expect anything good to come from any direction. “Accomodati,” Angelo said. “Sit down. The chair is ready.

” The man in the overcoat took off his hat and hung it on the coat rack. He sat in the barber’s chair. Angelo fastened the cape around his shoulders. The practiced motion of 40 years, the same gesture 10,000 times, the hands knowing exactly what to do regardless of what the rest of him was feeling.

The marshal was still at the door. The man with the briefcase was looking through the glass. Angelo picked up the comb. “How do you want it?” he said. “Same as always,” the man said. Angelo began to comb. His hands were steady. The comb moved through the dark hair, still thick, still dark, the hair of a younger man on a face that was beginning to show its years in the way that faces show years when they have been in the light a long time.

They did not speak for a moment. The comb moved. The radio sat silent on its shelf. Then Angelo said, very quietly, still in Italian, “I have to tell you something.” The man looked at him in the mirror. “I cannot do the cut today.” Angelo said. “There is a problem with the shop. A man outside. He is going to close it.

He has the paperwork and the lock and I have” He paused. “I have run out of ways to stop him.” He said it the way men of his generation said hard things, flat, without decoration, looking not at the man in the chair, but at the mirror, at his own hands, at the work. The man in the chair looked at him in the mirror for a long moment. “How much?” he said.

Angelo shook his head. “This is not your problem, my friend.” “How much?” Angelo set the comb down on the shelf. He looked at his hands. “Four months behind.” he said, “At the new rate, $380 a month since July. And the medical, Lucia” He stopped. “The medical is separate. The lease is $1,520. That is the number on the marshal’s paper.” The man was quiet for a moment.

He was looking at Angelo’s hands in the mirror, the hands of a man who had cut hair for 40 years and before that had held a rifle in southern Italy in 1944. The same hands, different work. He said, “Your wife.” Angelo nodded. “Her heart.” “Since the spring.” The man looked at the photograph on the wall.

The two soldiers, southern Italy, 1944. “That’s you.” he said. Angelo looked at it. “Yes.” “Which front?” “Anzio.” Angelo said. “Then north. I came home in ’45. I had the shop by ’46.” He paused. “America was very good to me.” He said it simply, without sentiment, the way a man states a fact he has tested against 30 years of evidence and found to be true.

The man in the chair was quiet again. Outside, the marshal shifted the padlock from one hand to the other. The man with the briefcase checked his watch. Notice what happened next because this is what 40 years of silence was protecting. The man in the gray overcoat reached up and removed the cape from his own shoulders. He stood up from the chair.

He was not tall, medium height, compact. But the room felt different when he stood. He put on his coat. He picked up his hat from the rack. He walked to the door. He opened it. The bell rang. That slightly higher bell, the one he knew. He stepped outside. The marshal looked at him. The man with the briefcase looked at him. Neither of them knew who he was.

Not yet. The hat was on. The collar was up. It was 8:55 in the morning on a back alley in Reno. And the last thing either of them was expecting was a famous man. “How much is on that paper?” the man said. The marshal looked at him with the flat patience of a man who has been interrupted in the middle of official business by a civilian.

“1,520 dollars. Court-ordered enforcement. Lease arrears.” The man had already reached into his inside coat pocket. He produced a wallet, dark brown leather, worn at the fold, and opened it on the marshal’s clipboard. He did not use the clipboard as a table. He counted in his hands, in the open, each bill visible. He counted 1,520.

“Where are you watching from?” Drop your state in the comments. I want to see how far this story reaches. He held the money out toward the man with the briefcase. The man with the briefcase looked at the money. He looked at the marshal. He looked at the man in the gray overcoat. Something was happening behind his eyes, the slow, reluctant arrival of a recognition he had not been prepared for.

The voice, the face, now that he was looking at it properly, without the hat shadow. The particular stillness. Receipt, the man said. On your company letterhead. Paid in full. Lease current through He looked at the marshal. When does the current term run? The marshal checked his clipboard. Through April.

Through April, the man said. Write it, sign it, date it today. The man with the briefcase set his case on the marshal’s hood. He opened it. He took out a sheet of letterhead and uncapped his pen and wrote. His hand was not entirely steady. He had placed the face now, had placed it beyond any doubt, and the placing of it had done something to his professional composure that he would not quite recover from before he got back to his car. He signed the receipt.

He handed it to the man. The man looked at it once. He folded it once. He went back through the door. The bell rang, and he walked to the barber’s chair and sat down again and set the receipt on the shelf beside the bay rum and the witch hazel and the talcum powder in the green tin. He looked at Angelo in the mirror.

Angelo had not moved from behind the chair. He was looking at the receipt on the shelf. His hands were at his sides. His face, the face of a man who has worked hard for a very long time and has learned to expect less than he deserves, was doing something complicated, something that involved a great deal of effort to contain and was not being entirely contained.

He looked at the man in the mirror. He had known for some time, he would say later, had suspected from the first buongiorno, but suspecting and knowing are different countries, and he had not let himself cross the border until now. Dino, he said. It came out quietly. The name from before the name, the name from Steubenville, from the Ohio River, from before Las Vegas and Hollywood and everything that came after.

The name his mother had called him. The man in the mirror said nothing. Angelo picked up the comb. His hands were shaking now, a fine tremor, barely visible, the kind that comes not from weakness but from the effort of holding something very large, very still for a very long time, and then being allowed, finally, to set it down.

He began to comb. The comb moved through the dark hair. The room was quiet. Outside, through the window, the marshal was walking back to his truck. The man with the briefcase was standing on the wooden sidewalk looking at his receipt copy as if reading it might change what it said. Stop for a moment and understand what was in that room.

The man in the chair had been born Dino Paul Crocetti in Steubenville, Ohio, in 1917, the son of a barber. His father, Gaetano, had cut hair on Sixth Street for 30 years. Dean had grown up in that shop, had swept the hair from the floor, had handed his father the comb, had learned the smell of bay rum and talcum before he learned anything else.

He had left Steubenville at 17 and had never gone back to live there, but he had carried the shop with him. Some things you carry without knowing you’re carrying them, and some things you know exactly, and this was one of the things he knew. Angelo said nothing for a long time. The comb moved.

The scissors came out. The work went on the way it always went, the same hands, the same mirror, the same small sounds. Then Angelo said, still in Italian, barely above a whisper, “Your father, was he a barber?” The man said, “Steubenville, 30 years.” Angelo nodded slowly. “I know what 30 years looks like.” he said. The scissors moved.

The hair fell in small dark pieces to the white cape. After a while, Angelo said, “I cannot pay you back.” The man looked at him in the mirror. “It’s not a debt.” he said. Angelo’s hands paused for just a moment. One beat, then continued. “Then what is it?” The man considered this. “Call it professional courtesy.” he said.

“One barber’s son to another.” Angelo looked at him in the mirror for a long time. Then he looked down at his hands, at the scissors, at the work. He finished the cut in silence. When he was done, he removed the cape and brushed the shoulders of the gray overcoat with the soft brush. The same brush, the same motion, the same three strokes across each shoulder that he had used for 32 years.

He held the coat while the man put it on. The man put on his hat. He picked up the receipt from the shelf and held it out to Angelo. Angelo took it. He looked at it. He looked at the man. He said in Italian, “How did you know? How did you know it was this bad?” The man turned up his collar. “A town talks.” he said. “It always did.

” He moved toward the door. He stopped. He turned back. Remember what he said next because it is the only explanation he ever gave to Angelo or to anyone else. He looked at Angelo, at the white jacket, the white hair, the hands that had held scissors for 40 years and before that a rifle in southern Italy.

“My father had a shop.” he said. “I know what it costs to keep one open.” He paused. “Don’t close it.” “Whatever else happens, don’t close it.” He pushed the door open. The bell rang, the slightly higher bell. He walked out onto the wooden sidewalk, turned up the alley toward Virginia Street, and was gone.

Angelo stood behind the barber’s chair for a long time after the bell stopped ringing. He stood there until the sound of the Truckee River came through the front window again. The sound that had always been there, under everything, the whole 32 years. Then he reached under the counter and turned the radio on.

He did not tell Lucia what had happened that morning. Not that day. Not for several weeks. Not until the account was current and the marshal had not come back and it was clear that the crisis had passed and passed completely. And even then he told her only that a customer had helped with the lease, a regular, someone who knew the shop. He did not say the name.

Lucia asked once and Angelo said, “A man who grew up with barbers.” She did not ask again. Listen, because what Lucia said, when Angelo finally told her, is the part of this story that Marco never forgot. And it matters more than the money or the receipt or any of the other things that can be held in a glass case.

He told her the name in 1959, on the evening of their 35th wedding anniversary. She listened the way she listened to things that mattered, very still, her hands in her lap, her eyes on his face. She said, “All that time.” He said, “All that time.” She was quiet a moment. Then she said, “Go downstairs and get the mortadella.

We should eat something.” He went downstairs and got the mortadella. They ate it at the kitchen table above the shop, with bread and a little wine, and the radio on low, and outside the window the Reno night going about its business, and neither of them said anything more about it, because there was nothing more to say.

Angelo Ferretti kept the shop open until 1971. He ran it 16 years after that Tuesday morning, through Lucia’s death in 1963, through his own advancing age, through the changes that came to the alley and to Virginia Street and to Reno itself as the ’60s turned into something else entirely. He kept the pole turning.

He kept the sign. He kept the bottles in their positions on the shelf, bay rum, witch hazel, talcum powder in the green tin, each one in the same place it had been since 1923. He died in 1974, 83 years old, in the apartment above the shop. His son Marco found him in the armchair by the window, the one that looked down onto the alley, the one from which on a clear morning you could see the red and white pole turning below.

Marco kept three things from the shop, the sign, Ferretti’s est. 1923, which he took down from above the door himself with a screwdriver the morning he closed it for the last time, the receipt, Washoe County Court letterhead, November 1955, paid in full, the signature in black ink at the bottom and a date in the corner that Marco had memorized before he was 10 years old, and a photograph, not the army photograph that stayed with the family, but another one, smaller, taken by Lucia in 1952 on one of Dean Martin’s earlier visits to Reno. Angelo is standing behind the barber’s chair. The man in the chair is in mid-sentence, turned slightly toward the camera, laughing at something just outside the frame. Angelo is not laughing. He is looking at the man in the chair with the expression of a craftsman who takes his work seriously and is pleased in this moment with the

result. Neither of them is looking at each other. They are both, in their different ways, exactly where they belong. Remember this because it is the last thing anyone expected, and it almost didn’t happen at all. In December of 1995, Dean Martin died in Beverly Hills. He was 78 years old.

The obituaries ran long. Steubenville, the Rat Pack, the movies, the voice that had seemed to cost him nothing. Marco Ferretti read one of them at the kitchen table in the same apartment where his father had died. And when he finished, he sat for a while looking at the window. Then he called the Reno Gazette-Journal.

The story ran in January of 1996. A small piece, inside section, below the fold. Someone clipped it and sent it somewhere, the way people do. And by spring, it had reached a columnist in San Francisco. And by summer, it was in the Nevada Historical Society’s archive under the heading “Steubenville Born Entertainer Charitable Acts Unverified”.

Unverified because the only living witness was Marco, and the only documentation was the receipt, and the receipt did not have a name on it, just a date, an amount, and a signature at the bottom that the Historical Society spent 3 months trying to authenticate before they concluded that it was, beyond reasonable probability, exactly what Marco said it was.

Marco donated the three items to the Nevada Historical Society in 2003. They are in the permanent collection, in a case on the second floor, next to a window that looks west toward the Sierra Nevada. The sign is there. Ferretti’s Est. 1923 The black letters on white still legible. The paint slightly cracked at the edges. The receipt is there.

The date, the amount, the signature, and the photograph is there. Angelo behind the chair. The man in the chair mid-laugh. Reno, Nevada, 1952. Lucia’s handwriting on the back in careful blue ink. She had written, “Angelo and his friend November the shop at its best. She had not written the name.

Marco asked her once years later why not? She thought about it. I didn’t want it to be about the name, she said. I wanted it to be about the shop. The afternoon light comes through that second floor window every day at around 2:00 and crosses the case. The sign, the receipt, the photograph for perhaps 20 minutes before it moves on to the wall behind.

The shop is gone now. The alley is still there. The pole is not. But on a clear November morning in Reno, if you walk down Ferris Alley from Virginia Street toward the river and stop at the far end where the alley bends, you can still see where the door frame was. A slightly different color in the brick, the outline of something that stood there for 48 years and held its ground.

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