City Journal: Why Your Boss Looks Shaggy
In his 50 years as a downtown barber—27 as the owner of Lenny’s Barber Shop at 50 Congress Street—Lenny Mancini had some big-deal clients. He tended to the locks of congressmen, judges, lawyers, and a laundry list of financial power brokers. He cut the hair of governors whom most politicians today don’t even remember—guys like the late Robert Bradford, who served in the ’40s. But late last month, Lenny finally hung it up. “The timing is right,” he says of his retirement, which he plans to spend in Italy.
Great for Lenny, but tough luck for his clients, now on the hunt for a barber for the first time in forever. “I’ve lost a lot of doctors and dentists by retirement, and I’ve survived that,” says Herbert P. Wilkins, a former Supreme Judicial Court chief justice who’s been a regular in Lenny’s chair for nearly five decades. “I’m not sure I’ll be able to survive this one.”