Barber Joe Quattrone, known as Joe Q., has been cutting the hair of some of America's most powerful leaders since 1970. Photo by Rob Wilkins.

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In Washington, D.C., a town where image can be everything, Joe Quattrone has been helping the very powerful look their very best for nearly 40 years. His client list is a "Who’s Who" of prominent policy-makers that includes presidents George H. W. Bush and Gerald Ford, Vice President Al Gore, Senator Ted Kennedy and House Speaker Tip O’Neill. Norman Mineta, the longest-serving Transportation Secretary in the Transportation Department’s history, became his close friend. New Jersey Representative Bill Pascrell talks with him about sopressata, hand-made Italian salami, which the barber knows how to make.

Quattrone stepped behind the chair in the House of Representatives barber shop – called House Cuts – with scissors in hand on March 2, 1970, and has been there ever since. Actually, he was supposed to start on March 1, but at 2:30 a.m. a bomb went off in the ladies’ bathroom of the Senate, so he had to delay a day.

Known as Joe Q, he is a dyed-in-the-wool—or in this case dyed-in-the-hair—success story. As a child on a farm in Italy, he sometimes had to flee to caves with his family during air raids in World War II. In 1948, he immigrated to Steubenville, Ohio—which is also the hometown of one of his heroes, the late singer and actor Dean Martin.

Joe Q has been president of the Italian American World War Veterans organization, and he was recently appointed to a Jefferson County, Ohio, commission to find someone who, as he expressed it, "has done a lot of good" and submit that person’s name for an award.

He shared his story in an exclusive interview with HistoryNet. The interview began on September 1 but had to be cut short—no pun intended—when a Congressman arrived for a haircut, and it was continued the next day.

HistoryNet.com: What made you decide to leave Italy and come to America?

Joe Quattrone: I came from farm land, and I didn’t like working the farm. I had a lot of family in Ohio who visited us in Italy. To me they were like a god. I wanted to be like them.

HN: You were a youngster in Italy during World War II. Since one of our magazines focuses on that war, do you mind telling us a little of what it was like from the perspective of a young Italian boy?

Joe Q: Italy was very clean. When Mussolini was in power, you couldn’t even spit in the street or throw paper in the street; you’d be fined. So it was very clean.

Where I lived, there were a couple hundred people in the town. During the war, we had caves to go to when (air raid) sirens would go off. Water would drip down on us and there was clay mud, but it was the only place we could go to get away from the bombs. There were five in my family. Once, when we were running to the caves, my grandmother got a stone under her foot and fell. She told my father, "Go, save yourself and the children. I’m old; if I die, it doesn’t matter."

My father told her, "If you die, we die with you." We helped her up, and we all made it to the cave.

Once, a fighter plane—I think it was German—came in low, maybe a couple of hundred feet in the air. I saw the guy with goggles in the cockpit. We thought we were all going to die, but he saw we were civilians running, and he took off. He didn’t shoot even one shot.

One day, some Germans came marching by. I was curious to talk to them; all of us kids were. They told us, "Today, tomorrow, ‘boom-boom-boom.’ Then no more boom-boom-boom. The war will be over; the Americans are coming."

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