Mr. Sam’s

When Sam Zanghi enters the hair salon, it takes him a full three minutes to pass the row of salon stations and reach the other end of the short hallway to the hair dryers. At every station and the space in between, there’s a conversation to be had. 

“Mr. Sam is here!” says a hairstylist cheerfully as daughter Lisa wheels him in. His other daughter, Laurie, looks up from the haircut she’s giving with a beaming smile. Two ladies sitting side by side at hair stations stop their chatter in mid-conversation and turn from their mirrors with a cheerful variation of “It’s so good to see you!” and an outstretched hand. Mr. Sam takes each one, giving a firm shake and a kind smile. “You too, how’ve you been?” he asks everyone, catching up briefly about their lives, their grandkids, daily life. Rinse and repeat until the stretch of the hallway has been traveled.

Just like the friendliness and camaraderie inside, the salon itself hasn’t changed much since its opening in the 60s. The original hooded hair dryers down the right-hand hall are in pristine condition. A couch near the break room that the staff refers to as “the aircraft carrier” — “it’s long enough to land a plane,” jokes son Lenny — has been around since the early years of the business. It feels like stepping into a time capsule that has preserved the simpler times. For most of the customers, going to Mr. Sam’s is a tradition that started in their childhood. “You know, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, they’re still coming here,” says Lisa as she settles into one of the unoccupied sky-blue leather chairs across to her father; reupholstered just once, they too are original to the salon. By the opposite wall, a woman wearing silver glitter tennis shoes reads a magazine, her hair set in rollers under the vintage hood. “I am now on five generations with some families at our salon,” says Laurie. “It is so exciting to watch our clients grow from kids to adults to have children and grandchildren.”

Mr. Sam served clients for over 50 years, attracting the clients from his home hair business to his then-new storefront. “They used to come out to my house in Morningside Manor,” he says, “and my wife took care of people. She fixed coffee, made cookies and did more work than I did!” he laughs. He says it was thanks to Elaine Zanghi that the couple moved back down to the Port City from Chicago. Mobile was her home and where the two first met during Mardi Gras one year. Sam, stationed in the Navy in Milton, Florida, at the time, came down for the festivities. “I was walking down Dauphin Street towards her with my buddy,” he remembers. “She was with a girlfriend of hers and the girlfriend threw some confetti right in my face. So I got some and threw it in her face. I ended up dumping my buddy on the other girl and I took [Elaine] to a little restaurant on the corner.” They dated for 14 months, and the rest is history. However, it almost never happened. “I’ll tell you how lucky I am. I say this all the time. My wife saved my life,” says Sam. “We were going to get married, but I was supposed to go on a 10-month cruise. I worked in aerial photography. A young man I worked with was on a six-month cruise, so we swapped cruises. I said, ‘Well, I want to get married in April, so that’ll work out just fine.’ Well, anyway, the ship that I was supposed to go on blew up. I would have worked right below the spot it blew up… My buddy was all right, he lived. If it wasn’t for that wedding, I’d have been on that ship.” He sits back. The brim of his USS Coral Sea CV-43 baseball cap dips as he lowers his head, thinking. “I’ve already had my nine lives,” he says eventually with a laugh. “I’m not sure what I’m still doing here.”

Although Sam obtained his advanced training at the American School of Hair Fashions in Chicago, “I did very little hair in Chicago,” he says. Instead, he and Elaine both worked at Marshall Field’s. “I was a camera salesman and my wife worked as a buyer’s secretary,” he says. “It was a good, nice job. And she really loved it there after we were there a while. But I promised her I’d bring her back in five years, and I did.” When they left, the company threw them a sendoff celebration. “We’re the only ones they ever had a party for,” he says with pride.

In Mobile with his wife and young children, Sam went straight to work in the hair business. He worked as a hairdresser at Pink Lady Coiffures on Old Shell Road. Later on, added being a hairdresser at Irene McVay’s in the Springhill Shopping Center to his resume. On weekends, he did hair out of his home, where he built an addition to house more hair dryers, serve more neighborhood customers and build his clientele. Eventually, an abandoned Chevron gas station on North McGregor Avenue became available for rent. He jumped at the chance. “I was lucky,” he says. “Things fell just right, and I got this place just in time.” 

Originally, his hair salon was called The Beauty Factory. A picture of the business in its first years hangs on the wall in the salon, showing a white building bearing the name in cheery multi-colored letters over the awning. But it wasn’t long before Mr. Sam’s became the obvious title. “Sam is my name, and I just put the ‘Mr.’ on there because ‘Mr. Sam’ is what I went by as a hairdresser,” he says simply. Sam handled the hair while Elaine oversaw the cosmetics, including facials. One of her special talents was applying lashes one at a time in a meticulous process. At $3 a cut in the early days, the salon was always filled with customers, hairdressers snipping away and conversation in a constant flow. “We didn’t have any trouble running because I had the cheapest price in Mobile,” he says. “I kept prices down because I liked the area, and the people were real nice to me. I was lucky.” And early newspaper clipping on Mr. Sam’s, touted its renowned reputation, stating, “Mr. Sam Zanghi, the man behind the business, will see to it that you are completely satisfied and that you will walk out looking and (feeling) like a new woman.”

As the years went on, the shop evolved to include jewelry — “When you get married, make sure you get a good diamond,” he advises — and clothing in a gift shop section. However, at its core, Mr. Sam’s focus was on hair, and the Zanghis’ four kids, Lenny, Laurie, Lisa and Lynnette, all did their part. “I would come up here and mop when I was a kid,” says Lenny. “We all did some work,” chimes in Lisa. She points to the arms of the chair she’s sitting in. “There were ashtrays right here and the customers used to smoke a lot. Everybody did at that time. They would light a cigarette, read a magazine and have some coffee while they waited for their hair to set. So, we would empty the ashtrays and clean up.” Photos lined up on the wall beside the hair washing stations show snapshots from the kids’ childhood days spent at the salon. In one, a little Lynnette stares wide-eyed into the camera, draped in a cape and wearing a shower cap over a perm. In another, a 5-year-old Lisa is fast asleep in one of the hair washing chairs. Several of the Zanghis came to work in the salon full time as adults. “I always knew when I graduated high school I wanted to go to beauty school,” says Laurie. “The day after I graduated high school in 1981, my dad took me up to Mobile Academy of Hair Design on Old Shell Road and enrolled me. I started beauty school the next day. I started working in Dad’s salon in 1982, 42 years now.” And they all watched out for each other in the process. “In the 90s and early 2000s, I started working on some of the movies filming in Mobile,” says Lenny, “just as an extra, but luckily he would let me take off work. We’ve had a fun life working up here in a family business.” That’s not to say they had it easy. “Dad was a very, very hard worker,” says Laurie. “The salon was open six days a week and sometimes he worked from seven in the morning to seven at night. He instilled great work ethic to me and my siblings. Even though we worked for him, he made sure we worked for our money. He never just handed us anything.”

And, after all these years, the work ethic lives on, and the business has stayed in the family. “My siblings and I actually bought the salon once my mother started needing more attention,” says Lenny, who is now the owner. That was about 15 years ago and marked Mr. Sam’s official retirement to spend more time with his wife. “I worked as long as I could,” he says. After 67 years of marriage, Elaine passed away in 2021. “She was good. Real, real good,” says Sam. “And smart. Just a good wife, a good mother.” When he is able, Sam still drops by every once in a while, saying hello to his customers, checking in and catching up. “All my customers, they’re all terrific,” says Sam. “A lot of people will say, ‘You have a lot of little old ladies over there,’ and I say, ‘Well, we’ve been here for 40 or 50 years now, we should be a little old.’” Lenny and Sam break into laughter. “I’m 94 years old, it’s hard to believe,” says Sam. “A lot of people say, ‘Well, how can you work with your family?’” says Lenny. “We’ve all gotten along pretty good. I always feel lucky.”

There’s a rustle of pages as the lady in the glitter shoes puts the magazine down. With a click, the hooded dryer is pushed back. Her rollers have set. It’s easy to imagine the exact same process 50 years ago, coupled with the same love Mr. Sam still has for his clientele. “I have a lot of customers. They like me and I like them,” says Sam. “I’ll never forget it.”