TONY THE BARBER

WHO KNOWS ANTHONY O. CACIOPPO? Well, Pudge Neidlinger, an allaround boy. Bashful, careful Cotty Larmon. Regular Fletch Low. Cheerful A1 Frey, full of fun. Bill Cunningham, who has to be understood. Allan Macdonald, a very pleasant chap.

Sid Hayward, who got acquainted with everyone; John Stearns, an independent sort of guy; Bob Strong, a gentleman from the first day he came here; and thousands of other Dartmouth and Hanover men, the best in the country.

The descriptions are Mr. Cacioppo's. In most cases, he is recalling the men when they were undergraduates. About President Hopkins' activities last year, however, he had this to say: "The President wore his short in the summer and long in the winter." Wore what short and long?

Fourteen years ago, The Dartmouth carried the headline, "Civilization Spreads in Hanover. Tony Goes Into Business. Tony! Tony the barber. Even his wife, one of the Tanzi girls, is known as Mrs. Tony. "To Dartmouth men," the daily wrote, "Hanover's most popular barber has been known simply as Tony, the genial and soft-handed wielder of the rubberset who for more than a dozen years has cut the hair and shaved the beards and washed the ears of undergraduates and faculty alike."

The Boston Transcript reprinted in full the above story. Tony knew the writer. He knows almost everyone in Hanover. The debut of his barber shop in 1926 was an important community event, and recently Tony remembered how, when he opened over Campion's, a student approached him and confided that all Hanover needed now to be modern and civilized was a decent restaurant.

Civilized. Tony further mellowed by more than a decade of intimate concern with Hanover and its people, fits the word just as much today as he did then. It is high compliment to an ambitious immigrant who, in the warm Latin enthusiasm for his profession, regards anyone's calling him a "tonsorial expert" as unduly flippant, even derogatory. Tonsorial smacks of hi-jinks, and Tony is not like that.

He is quiet, unassuming and reserved. You wouldn't believe that he courted and married Ethel Tanzi in less than three months after meeting her in 1914. Today, with two daughters, one already married, Tony warned he would spank his children if they even thought of conducting a similar Hollywood romance. Tony has settled into the ways of the town he loves.

He came to Hanover in 1913 on a two weeks' vacation and has never left except for other vacations and football games. "I'm attached to the town," he said. "While the undergraduates are here, they don't have much feeling for Hanover. But watch them when they come back. They discover what I've known all along!"

His affection for Hanover is important. It explains his interest in Dartmouth, its teams and its students. And it explains his anger at the undergraduates who spend four years on the campus and then are acquainted with the townspeople only well enough to mutter, "Hiya, Joe," when buying their beer. "What are those students living for," he asked, "if they don't live while they're here." Living means sympathy and fellowship to Tony.

And Tony, although nearly eighty per cent of the general barber shop conversation centers around Big Green teams, particularly football, is irked because the students don't take a more active interest in national and political events. "They're college dumbells," he comments bluntly and wisely. "I like my games—and even funny papers—but they are other things, too."

"Last year," he related, "a senior came to the shop in the afternoon and kidded me about being one of Mussolini's fascists. Sure, he was just kidding, but the conversation turned to world events, and I'll be damned if I wasn't so disgusted with this boy's ignorance that I had to tell him to keep quiet. While he sat in the chair, I told him just what I felt about college men. I gave him facts and reasons.

"Two weeks later," Tony continued, smiling now and emphasizing with his expressive hands, "this student came back to the shop and told me that he'd written a paper on the low political intelligence of Dartmouth undergraduates. He had used all the facts that I'd given him that afternoon when I bawled him out. He said that the professor gave him on the paper the only A he'd ever made at college!"

Naturally Tony has other stories to tell about his contact with undergraduates since 1913, his first year in town. That sons of men whose hair he cut more than twenty years ago now patronize his neat shop and three assistants doesn't seem unusual to him. It is not heresy to say that he knows more students more personally than do a majority of the professors who have been at the College decades. You can't give a student a whiffle or plaster goo on his hair twelve or fifteen times a year for four years without getting acquainted with him.

A short time ago, "Doc" Spillane, a premed came to Tony and began a barber shop conversation. He was amazed at the length of Tony's career at Dartmouth and said, tentatively, "Why, you must have known my father, class of '13."

"Sure I knew your father," Tony re- plied.

"Don't kid me," Spillane countered. "You're just trying to impress me. You can't really remember that far back."

"Look," Tony said, in a very condescending tone, "I remember your father very well, see? When he was a senior, he courted my girl, Ethel. But I wasn't waiting for a diploma and could work faster. I beat him and married her before your father graduated!"

It is not premature, considering his years in Hanover, but it is a bit stagey to make Tony out as a character. Or a philosopher. Both seem hollow categories in which to place him, especially after knowing him. He is not naive, nor is he a local pillar around which undergraduate wit and anecdote revolve. He is, rather, intelligent and discerning, observant and at ease among Dartmouth tradition and life. Like a professor, he has entertained students in his home. Like a student, he has played ragtime on a guitar at a Green Key Show and worried about the football weather.

And, like a successful alumnus, he has been toasted and complimented in an important speech before the assembled college community: A graduate whose hair had greyed, thinned, then become bald, returned to Hanover to speak. "I've come back," this graduate said, "and my head is bald—despite all the care that Tony gave me."

KING OF HIS DOMAIN AND A PHILOSOPHER TOO