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Bob Leonelli’s hand is at the helm
Gallery
By Graig graziosi
Boardman
Before his family members in the Mahoning Valley got sick, Bob Leonelli ran a barbershop on the beach in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
His commitment to family – and to a small Market Street shop – brought him home.
Today, Leonelli’s hand is at the helm of Dom’s Barber Shop in Boardman, just as the business celebrates its 80th birthday.
Photo Gallery: Dom's Barber Shop
“I just couldn’t let this little shop shut down,” he said.
The shop opened in 1937 on Market Street – a dirt road at the time – and was owned by an Italian immigrant named James Bertrando Sr. Bertrando was an apprentice barber in Naples, Italy, before making the trip across the Atlantic to open his shop in Boardman. Bertrando’s operation – named Bertrando’s Barber Shop – grew to eventually feature six barbers, including his brother-in-law and apprentice, Dominic Cafaro.
When Bertrando died in 1962, the barbershop passed into the hands of his apprentice, Cafaro. Following his brother-in-law’s naming conventions, Cafaro renamed the shop “Dom’s Barber Shop,” a name it continues to bear today. When Market Street underwent a widening, the shop was moved two blocks back to its current location on the corner of Market Street and Sciota Avenue.
The shop changed hands twice more before reaching Leonelli. When Cafaro hung up his clippers in 1985, he passed the shop onto his senior barber, Will Kosco. Kosco operated the shop until he retired in 2003, after which his senior barber, Jack Ferreri, took ownership.
It was under Jack Ferreri’s turn at the wheel that Leonelli first became involved with the shop.
Leonelli left Youngstown for Fort Lauderdale, Fla., when his daughter moved to Florida to attend college. A lifelong barber in a family of barbers – his son and brother are barbers as well – Leonelli opened his own shop on the beach in Fort Lauderdale and assumed he’d spend the last decades of his career running clippers under the sun.
When his mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and his brother developed a degenerative illness, he decided to split his time between his shop in Florida and caring for his family in Youngstown. At the time, Ferreri had largely stepped away from working at the shop due to an illness of his own and, upon hearing Leonelli was back in town, asked the younger barber if he could work some shifts at the shop.
Leonelli was happy to pick up shifts – he beams while taking about his job – but his obligations to his own business and his family kept him from any kind of full-time work.
During this interim period, primarily between 2013 and 2015, Dom’s was open only sporadically due to Ferreri’s health and issues finding full-time staff.
Leonelli said that the shop’s fluctuating hours resulted in a number of regular customers leaving for other barbers. He feared that if things continued that way, the shop might go under for good. So, in early 2016, Leonelli made the decision to buy the shop.
Since then, the family members for whom he returned to Ohio to help have passed, but that hasn’t changed Leonelli’s determination to revive the shop.
“There’s too much history here, too many customers who’ve been coming here their entire lives,” he said.
He’s not exaggerating; Leonelli has more than 20 regular customers over age 90, and a steadily growing list of former regulars returning to the shop they once thought shut down.
Eventually, Leonelli hopes to return to Fort Lauderdale to retire, but before he returns to the sun and surf, he has one goal he wants to accomplish.
“We’re at 80 years now, and the shop has come so far,” Leonelli said. “I want to get this place to a hundred years.”