A tonic for modern-day angst

"Mio Dio!" says Mike. "You must relax, or your hair won't grow back."

I'm sitting in the chair of honor in Mike's Barbershop, in Seattle's Rainier Valley. Some rough estimating suggests mine is the 250,000th head to bow to Mike's clippers since he opened at this spot after World War II, 60 years ago. Apparently scolding me in his Italian-accented English doesn't soothe me as he'd hoped. So Mike, full name Michele Prontera, pulls out an ancient vibrator device, attaches it to his hand and begins a pulsing scalp and shoulder massage.

Aaahhh. Now that is what people still come from miles around and generations across to get. A cut. A massage. A taste of Seattle's old Garlic Gulch.

"Mamma mia," Mike says, as my eyes roll back into my head.

Mostly they come for Mike. His 10-foot-wide tan shop isn't in the phone book. A tiny barber pole outside long ago lost its red, white and blue striping.

Mike claims he doesn't want any more customers. But the customers keep coming. And so at age 90 he keeps showing up, 8 a.m. 'til 2, as he has since he opened his first shop a block from the sea in Lecce, Italy, when he was 16.

Last week, a 64-year-old retired Seattle cop came in for a cut. There's a black-and-white photo on the wall that shows a mustachioed young Mike cutting this same guy's hair, in this shop, back when the cop was a towheaded 4-year-old.

Sixty years with some of the very same customers. Some pay in bottles of wine. Some pay in lottery tickets. Some don't pay at all because he won't let them.

Another is Steve Roberts. He's a checker at the QFC around the corner. He says he's barely qualified to talk about Mike's shop because he's only been coming for 10 years.

"There's nothing like it," Roberts says, after getting his trim and massage. "Nobody cuts hair like this anymore."

There's a sign in Mike's shop that reads, "Please, no conversations on politics or religion." Few obey it. Least of all Mike.

See, he knows a thing or two about diplomacy. He fought on both sides in World War II.

He was a machine-gunner in a tank for Mussolini's army in North Africa. The British captured him. After trading his stylish, knee-length leather and wool Italian army jacket, he was turned over to the Americans.

The U.S. military offered him and scores of Italian soldiers a deal: Join our army, and we'll feed and take care of you. Mike agreed, and before he knew it he was a sergeant — and barber — for a 440-man Italian Service Unit. It was a labor battalion stationed in an old industrial plant along the Duwamish in Seattle.

"I would cut hair sometimes from 8 in the morning until 11 at night," Mike says. "The Americanos would come from all over to get haircuts. And to eat at our camp. Because we are Italiano, you know the food was so much better."

He was about to be shipped out to fight against Japan, for our side, when the war ended.

He went home to Italy. But this time, it was love that brought him back to Seattle. He had met a local Italian-American girl, Mary Vacca, at one of the camp dances. She later hunted him down in Italy and they married.

In 1947 he opened his Seattle shop, giving haircuts for 50 cents across the street from Sick's baseball stadium (it's now a Lowe's).

He cut the hair of dozens of Pacific Coast League baseball players. Such as Yankee manager Billy Martin, when Martin was a second baseman in the minors. Local legend Fred Hutchinson. And Dewey Soriano, who owned the Pilots, the city's first major-league team.

But mostly, Mike has been the barber for generations of Garlic Gulchers, the name given the Italians of Rainier Valley. The bakery Borracchinis are his customers. So are the sausage Obertos. The political Rosellinis.

He used to give shaves with a straight razor, until the state government asked him to stop (too dangerous, they said).

He also boasts he once cut the hair of the pope. I'm pretty sure he was kidding.

"It's all a family to me," Mike says. "That's why I don't retire. I want to die before I retire."

No sign of that. For his 90th birthday this year, he went to Vegas.

"Maybe 10 more years," he says.

It has been said over and over that Seattle is vanishing. That we have allowed our city's history and soul to be completely blanderized as we rush for money, growth and gentrification.

It isn't all true. For proof, take an hour to sit in Mike's chair. You'll feel old Seattle spring back to life for yourself.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at dwestneat@seattletimes.com.