Lucy Gellman Photo
DeSisto.
For Phil’s Hairstyles proprietor Pasquale DeSisto, the journey to successful American citizenship started not with soapy lather and the fine snip of handheld shears, but with six small grocery stores scattered across West Haven in the late 1960s.
All of the stores bore the same name: Paisano, a peasant of humble beginnings.
Today DeSisto, who is 75 years old, runs three shops with the same name — Phil’s — on Wall Street, Whitney Avenue, and Broadway. He’s opening a fourth soon on Audubon.
The road to “Phil” began with “Paisano.”
Originally from the outer rings of Naples, DeSisto came to the United States in February 1963, the last in a family of 10 to settle in New Haven. He saw his brother Silvio, with whom he had owned and operated three barbershops in Italy, adjust to the new country. But Pasquale found himself longing for his home country — despite the paucity of employment opportunities that had inspired him to go to England, and then to America.
“I was the last one to come over here,” he said in an interview for WNHH radio’s “Open for Business.” From living with his mother on New Haven’s Hallock Street to buying a small home of his own in West Haven, “I work for some place in North Haven for some guy, I work in Orange Street, and after … I open a barbershop in Milford.”
But times were tough. In the midst of bringing over his then-girlfriend, Joanna, from Italy as his bride in 1964, and the birth of their son shortly thereafter, he found that there wasn’t significant enough demand for a barbershop in Milford. Money was very tight, and getting tighter. So, in 1968, he tried something different: selling the shop in Milford to open the first Paisano, a small grocery store in West Haven stocked with basics like milk, bread and butter.
It worked, slowly but steadily. “After I buy the business … I was making money, and I was happy to make that kind of money,” he said. “Said: ‘I gotta try to do something different.’ What I did — I buy a house and buy a grocery store business. After a time, then my future starts to change.”
After several months in business, he had the money to open another store. And another. And another, putting siblings including Silvio to work at a total of six stores across West Haven as Joanna raised their son and a daughter at home. And then, in 1981, he did something he’d wanted to do since coming: he left. Taking Joanna and the children, DeSisto went back to Italy “with a good future,” thinking that things might be financially stable enough for them to remain there.
But that never happened. The country that he had left — or at least several of its citizens — acted like it didn’t wanted him back.
“In Italy I had a bad experience,” he said, asking not to go into detail when pressed. “There are a lot of crooked people over there. I come back over here … to tell the truth, in Italy I lost one million dollar.”
He and his son returned to the U.S. in in the 1990s completely broke, barely scraping by with factory work when opening another grocery store wasn’t financially viable. Then in 1995, he saw that a familiar trade was hiring: Phil’s Barbershop on Wall Street, then owned by fellow Italian Rocky D’Eugenio, needed a seasoned barber. After one day of apprenticing, he felt at home, picking up new tricks as he employed old ones that he had learned as a boy back in Naples.
“I got a lot of experience from him,” he recalled in the interview. “Even though I was a barber before, from him I get a lot more experience.”
When Rocky announced he was selling the business the following year, Pasquale saw it as his window, getting a large loan from People’s Bank to cover the costs. The name would remain the same, he decided, but things like furnishing and client base would change and grow under his leadership.
“It cost me a lot of money,” he said. “I had clientele, but I was broke. I don’t have no money. But the guy [D’Eugenio] wanted 80,000 dollars. I don’t even have one penny in the pocket! So … because I was a good barber, I had a lot of clientele over there, when Rocky told me he wanted to sell the place … I wanted to buy the place. I had no money. I went to the bank … and I buy [the shop].”
That was the beginning of Phil’s Hair Styles as New Haveners know it today. There were pitfalls along the way: while paying back the loan, DeSisto bought spots on Broadway and in Milford, only to sell the former and see the latter go under. A shop on Orange Street that had belonged to the Phil’s legacy for years ultimately became too much to handle, and was sold to Stacy Quattlebaum of Orange Street Hairstyles in 2012.
But there were also victories. In the late ‘90s, Pasquale convinced Silvio to sell his barbershop in West Haven and join the New Haven businesses, a client base growing to include Yale presidents Rick Levin and Peter Salvoey, and U.S. President George H.W. Bush, who decided to get a trim on a visit to his alma mater — and managed to close the entire street in the process. “When the president come in, close every street, we was making no money!” he exclaimed. “But we got a lot of big people”
“We got the best clientele over here, we got all the best,” he said. Not just Yale presidents, faculty, and students, he clarified — also neighborhood kids who have gotten to know him as the friendly barber, giver of after-school lollipops, and an extended family of New Haveners, who spread the word about the shops after a positive haircut experience.
“For me the United States is a second family,” he said as the interview wound down. “Because it gives the opportunity to work, to make money. If you want to work over here, that’s the best. In Italy … that’s my country, I love it, but not for living. For living it’s no good. This country gave me opportunity for everything.”
This interview is part of WNHH-LP’s “Open For Business” series on immigrant business owners and leaders in the nonprofit community. “Open for Business is sponsored by Frontier Communications. Frontier is proud to be Connecticut’s hometown provider of TV and internet for your home and business. Their phone number is 1.888.Frontier and their website is Frontier.com