The sign outside Freddy’s Barbershop on Eramosa Road is known for its witty messages that reflect the sense of humour and playful nature of the owners and the staff inside.
“We put a lot of funny things on that sign,” said first-chair barber, Ed Veri. “One day we put, ‘Need therapy? Come in. We listen.’ We had another one, ‘Six barbers – four good ones. Feeling lucky?’ We just had fun with it and that brought in so much business.”
The message posted this week was a bit more bittersweet than usual for Veri given that it announced the end of an era at Freddy’s: ‘Congratulations Ed on your retirement.'
“I have customers that go back 55 – 56 years,” said Veri. “There is so much history here and I have met so many nice people over the years. That is what I am going to miss most.”
The year 1964 was significant for the barbering business internationally and locally. It was the year the Beatles arrived in America with their trademark, trend-setting mop tops and the year Ed Veri started his career as a barber.
“We were all young,” said Veri. “I was 16. My brother Fred was 26 and Benny, the second chair was 23. We were the three originals from the shop, Freddy, Benny and Eddy.”
The world was changing and that was reflected in songs such as Blowing in the Wind by Bob Dylan that was topping the charts when Veri was in barbering school in Toronto.
“When I finished school, my instructor suggested I stay and take a course for a couple weeks in men’s hairstyling,” he said. “At that time, you had barber shops and beauty salons – no men’s hairstyling. It was a new thing coming in. So, I stayed and that is when I started working with a blow-dryer. There were no blow-dryers in barber shops. It was the wet look, which was grease in your hair and that was what was happening.”
The winds of change were blowing west from the Big Smoke to the Royal City and they followed Veri all the way back to Freddy’s Barbershop.
“When I came back, we started blow-drying hair and went from the wet look to the dry look,” he said. “The timing was right for us. We were all young and we came in with the new hair cutting and hair styles. We went from Freddy’s Barbershop to Freddy’s Barbershop & Men’s Hairstyling.”
The new look caught on quick with young people.
“We were jammed here on Fridays because everyone wanted to blow dry their hair before they went to the dance,” said Veri. “Everybody had to look cool.”
For nearly 50 years Freddy’s has been located in the former Bullfrog Inn on Eramosa Road, an historic limestone building erected in 1845, but their first shop was in a plaza further up Eramosa at the corner of Metcalfe Street.
“In 1959 Freddy went to work there for Ted DeCorso, who built the Victoria Park Golf Club,” said Veri. “In ’62 he bought the business from Ted and that’s when it became Freddy’s. We stayed at that location until 1970 then we moved down Eramosa to a plaza that had a TD Bank and a couple stores. It is now the parking lot of Shoppers Drug Mart. We stayed there from 1970 to New Year’s Eve 1973 when we moved in here.”
The building underwent a number of renovations to accommodate their growing clientele and expanding services.
“We put the barbershop in this section, and we extended it behind,” said Veri. “A few years later we took out the apartments next door and we put in the hair salon.”
The hair piled up on the barbershop floor as lengths and styles evolved with popular culture. Freddy’s went through a variety of notable sweepers including former Guelph MPP Rick Ferraro and the chief political correspondent for Global News, David Akin, when he was studying at the U of G in the early ‘90s.
Many local hairstylists and salon owners honed their craft at Freddy’s as well.
“Tony from Salon DiLoreto was a sweeper here,” said Veri. “Lore Bortolon came to work for us and Joe Rossit. There was also Dan Di Ilio from Tangles. We had a lot of guys working the fourth chair. The turnover was always in the fourth chair.”
When Freddy and Eddy weren’t clipping and buzzing, they were swinging and jiving.
“Fred and I used to play in a band,” said Veri. “We started as the Fred Veri Quintet then we had the Pepper Company. We used to do a lot of weddings, banquets, parties, stuff like that. We played for years.”
Veri has two children, Erika and Dean from his first marriage, and a daughter, Ava, from his second marriage to Sonia Natoli, who also works at Freddy’s.
He is the youngest of four children born to Umberto and Nicoletta Veri.
“My brother Earnie, Ernesto, is the oldest,” said Veri. “I am the youngest. My brother and sister have passed on from cancer.”
On Thursday, Nov. 23, 2017, the sign out front of Freddy’s announced the heartbreaking news, “Freddy – Forever in Our Hearts.”
Freddy Veri, the founder and first chair at Freddy’s Barbershop had died at the age of 79 from cancer. He was survived by his wife Vicki, son Roberto and daughter Deanna, who also works as a hairstylist at her father’s shop.
Benny Carbone had retired in 2011 at the age of 70, making Ed the last of the original three. Even though he remained characteristically young at heart, losing Freddy was very difficult especially after the death of his sister Angela Moretti months earlier at the age of 74 and his mother in the summer of 2016 at the age of 100.
“I will be 73 this month,” said Veri. “I don’t feel that way. Had it not been for COVID, I don’t think I would have retired. We shut down the first time then we came back and set up the partitions, re-did the bathrooms and other small renovations. This time when we shut down and I started to hear we were going back to work, I don’t know. It wasn’t in me. I came in here one day and said, ‘You know what? I don’t think I want to come in here anymore.'”
The decision fit perfectly with the philosophy that has made Freddy’s successful for more than half a century.
“We always looked at it this way,” he said. “People aren’t crazy about going to the dentist, the doctor or their lawyer. You have an option when you go to the barbershop. You want to come, or you don’t want to come. If you like it, you come and you only come because you like it, not because you have to.”
He is confident that the new generation of barbers and hairstylists at Freddy’s will carry on with that philosophy and keep the next generation of Freddy’s clients happy and stylish.
“I will definitely miss the people,” he said. “It’s fun. It is really fun. We brought in colour technicians, cutting people, all kinds of people came in – good people, and that’s how we kept up with the game. We stayed a little bit ahead of the game and you need that. If you don’t advance. If you don’t move, you ain’t going anywhere.”
