He could have wound up like his dad who, at 47, had to leave a settled life behind to start another, and risk it regularly on construction sites, just to give opportunity to his children.

The young Mr. Accaputo didn't waste his. Within days of landing in Canada from Sicily, with his parents and three sisters, in the spring of 1957, he landed a job in a barber shop on Bathurst Street. This Saturday he'll mark 50 years here, the last 44 under his own name, painted in big, bold letters on the wooden sign out front.

The shop might not look like much from the lofty heights of the area's hottest new condo, wherever it might be this month. Still, it's been everything to Mr. Accaputo, which nobody calls him, so let's just call him Corrado.

Corrado, 67, says "until" when he means "as long as." He also says, "What are you gonna do?" when he's finished with a story, and he has lots of those.

His began in Pachino, Sicily, on Feb. 22, 1940. His first memory is of his first job, when he was 5, disinfecting the cut ends of grapevines on one of his family's small vineyards.

Haircuts followed, but prospects for a decent future did not. At 16, Corrado, the only son among three daughters, began to work on his dad. "I said, 'Papa, we've got to go,' " and his father said, "I'm too tied here," but eventually, he relented.

Corrado, meanwhile, took all of two weeks to land a chair at Augustino (Gus) Gentile's barber shop on Bathurst, on the west side, a hair south of Richmond.

It'll be a far bigger spread than the one he puts on for himself each afternoon, when he slips into the back room, past a week's worth of fresh, white uniforms, and returns with his lunch: two sandwiches (today it's one pastrami, one provolone), and a tomato he'll eat like an apple.

Rina's never here to see the gusto with which he wolfs them down, but Bruno often is. Bruno rents the apartment upstairs, and when he's not killing time with Corrado, he sweeps up or runs errands for him.

If Bruno's not around, there are the girls -- Lianna Cole, who was Miss Nude Hollywood, Ca., smiling from a badly faded poster, or Playboy's Miss December, nineteen-sixtysomething, or whoever that is on the 2001 Hawaii's Exotic Girls calendar.

There's also Elvis, Ann-Margret and Marcello Mastroianni. For that matter, there's a Resdan bottle, among other aging concoctions he hasn't seen the need to ditch just yet.

And there are the customers, men mostly, but women too, and kids who have to sit on a board across the chair's arms. Many cry, at least the first time.

That's why he has a hug and a kiss for Danuta Radomski as soon as she steps through the door. She was 12 the first time her dad brought her in. Now she's 60.

Corrado attended Ms. Radomski's wedding to Kazimierz Maucy in 1986, and she was a guest when the barber's sons, Ross and Roberto, got married.

As the conversation progressed, the minister spoke of his military service in Sicily during the Second World War, and after a few questions, it became clear the soldier had set foot on Corrado's grandfather's farm.

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