Anthony Mancinelli still cuts hair...

...at age 98.

He started cutting hair when Calvin Coolidge was in the White House. He was 12.

The people at the Guinness Book of World Records who concern themselves with such things have proclaimed Mr. Mancinelli, who turns 99 on March 2, the world’s oldest barber.

____

“He might be pushing 100,” [one customer] said, “but he still gives the best shaves around.”

Is that safe?

After dusting off Mr. Jaffe’s neck with a brush full of talcum powder, Mr. Mancinelli seated another man, and in a voice just loud enough to be heard over a Filippo Valli song playing on the radio, began telling him how old-school barbers like himself “were once like doctors.”

“I used to have a bottle of leeches on my counter, and I would put them on people’s skin to drain blood,” he said, not noticing that half a dozen men waiting for him and three other barbers were hanging on his every word. “In those days, while giving a haircut, I would put a leech over a black eye to bring down the swelling, or on the arm of someone who had high blood pressure because the thinking was their pressure might drop.”