Image Credit: Mel Rothenburger

By Mel Rothenburger

Armchair Mayor

ROTHENBURGER: Saying farewell to John DeCicco, the Barber of Main Street

Jan 27, 2024 | 7:58 AM

THE BARBER OF MAIN STREET, John DeCicco, died this week. He was a friend of mine.

Besides cutting hair, John was a former City councillor. I knew him for some 30 years, before, during and after politics. In 1999, we were both elected to City council. I served for two terms and John stayed for two more. We remained friends as I returned to my job at The Kamloops Daily News and he carried on with his council work and his business, and beyond that when we were both retired.

Born in Italy, John came to Canada as a teenager with his family, went through school here and decided to become a barber. After getting his licence, he opened up the Continental Barbershop and trimmed the hair of Kamloopsians for half a century before retiring in 2015.

Civic politics was a natural extension of his barbering. When you have a barbershop on the main street, in the heart of downtown, and you’re a good listener, it’s almost inevitable you’ll become a sounding board on life in your city.

When John retired, I wrote a column I headlined “Crisis hits hair care – John DeCicco retires.” In fact, I wrote about John several times over the years.

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There were his famous Barber’s Polls (as opposed to barber’s poles) on elections at all levels, for which he claimed an 80-per cent accuracy rate, more than the professional pollsters could boast. Sometimes, I acted as his returning officer, counting up the ballots from his customers and stoppers by.

His shining hour with those polls was in the May 2013 B.C. election when Adrian Dix and the NDP were in a 20-point lead, according to the big-time pollsters. It looked certain that the reputation of the Barber’s Poll would take a drubbing, since it forecast a Liberal landslide. But once again, the barber got it right — Christy Clark and her Liberals swept back into office with an easy win.

One of the few times John’s poll got it wrong was when it predicted I would come third in the five-candidate mayor’s race in 1999. I enjoyed reminding him of that every once in a while, to keep him grounded.

The public profile he had through “the shop” wasn’t the only thing that propelled him into a seat at the council table; he was involved in many community and church organizations and in soccer, so he was well-known.

That council got a lot done: the Tournament Capital Centre, the McDonald Park rehabilitation project, the McArthur Island Sports and Events Centre expansion, the much-needed water treatment plant. It was a time for building and for transforming City Hall into a transparent, connected entity.

He was a man of conservative values (some would say old school), so our politics clashed sometimes but we worked well together.

Besides the business of council, there were a lot of fun times. One year he, Coun. Peter Sharp, Coun. Dave Gracey and I dressed up as the Four Elvis’s, Elvis wigs and all, and performed a terrible rendition of Blue Christmas at the City’s annual seniors lights tour program. Christmas was also always a time to enjoy his wife Darlene’s amazing Christmas baking.

In 2010, after I’d left council to return to the paper, and John was still on council, he and I teamed up for the annual Communities in Bloom pot planting “competition.” We lost.

The Daily News created The Kamloops Project, in which residents were invited to submit photos of what they were doing on Feb. 29, 2012, and we published hundreds of them — a one-day snapshot of our city. My contribution was a selfie of John DeCicco trimming my hair at “the shop.”

For years, we got together for coffee every other week or so to swap war stories about the good old days when we “got things done” on council, shaking our heads sadly at the state of City Hall and wondering why the current bunch couldn’t do things as well as we did. John and I usually ganged up on Peter Sharp in those discussions, and made him pay for the coffee. Since John and I were the same age, and Peter is a few years younger, we’d dismiss his opinions as the inexperience of youth, even after we hit our 70s.

Over time those coffees became much less frequent, but we’d still connect once in a while. I’ll miss those coffees, and the haircuts, and the friendship.

John DeCicco was a good citizen, a good barber, and a good man.

Mel Rothenburger is a regular contributor to CFJC Today, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a recipient of the Jack Webster Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. He has served as mayor of Kamloops, school board chair and TNRD director, and is a retired daily newspaper editor. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or Pattison Media.