Mr. Figaro, Sheepshead Bay’s Singing Barber, Dies At 88
For more than 30 years, visitors to Mr. Figaro’s barber shop on Avenue Z left the store with a neat trim and a tune in their ears. The haircut cost a few bucks but the song was free. And the man who provided both was Jacob Mammon, better known as Jerry May or Mr. Figaro, the singing barber of Sheepshead Bay.
“Everything about him was musical. He was so full of life. And he always treated you like a real person. No matter who you were or what color shoes you had on,” said Al Burgo, a longtime friend and customer. “He just made people happy. It came so natural. I got 10 haircuts from him in a seven day period once.”
Jerry passed away on Friday, October 16, at the age of 88. He succumbed to organ failure and internal bleeding related to a period of declining health that began after a stroke in 2010, according to his son, Albert Mammon.
“Even after his stroke, when he was not able to communicate fully, he still had it in his soul to keep singing. He wouldn’t be able to sing every song, but he would hum it,” said Albert. “He felt the music until the last day.”
Jerry’s love of music has been well documented. In the 1980s, almost every news channel in New York City came to Mr. Figaro’s storefront at 1919 Avenue Z, near Ocean Avenue, to film the boisterous barber belting opera arias, Jewish and Irish folk songs, and jazz standards. He could sing in Russian, Hebrew, English, Italian, and Spanish, and he covered songs made famous by crooners like Frank Sinatra, Pavarotti, Nat King Cole and Elvis Presley. But his favorite was Al Jolson.
“Jolson is my hero, yes sir,” Jerry told Channel 2 News during an interview.
Albert, who spent many days at the barber shop when he was young, remembers his father as a great entertainer, but also as a great counselor to those in need of advice.
“He was always the person you could go to and sit down in the chair for 30 or 40 minutes and talk. And after the haircut was over, some customers would just want to hang out with him. Sometimes they would bring a Heineken over and they would say, “Hey Mr. Figaro, here’s a Heineken,” and they would talk,” Albert recalled.
But Jerry was also a master hairstylist. Sal Gurgov, who took over as the store’s owner after Jerry’s stroke, said he learned how to cut hair the old fashioned way while working for Jerry.
“He would do everything with scissors, the old school way. He would say to me, drop the machine, learn this technique, scissors are the best. Because when you cut with the machine, it’s automatic. You mess up, that’s it. Scissors, you take control, basically,” said Gurgov, who kept Mr. Figaro’s name on the storefront to honor the hometown hero.
Jerry’s trade as well as his passion for song came from his childhood in Soviet Russia. Born into a family of barbers living in Bukhara, part of modern day Uzbekistan, on August 14, 1927, his love of music had much to do with the lively culture of the region.
However, when Jerry was very young, his family was forced to flee their homeland to escape Soviet persecution. He and his mother landed in Iran, where they lived for three years while his mother worked at the British consulate. They later traveled through Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon until they arrived in Tel Aviv, Israel, where they reunited with his father.
The family eventually moved to London, using his mother’s connections in the British embassy to secure visas, where Jerry, now a young man, opened his first barbershop.
“In London, he was known as Jack the singing barber,” said Albert.
Jerry lived in London for 10 years before his family made their way to the United States through Canada. He settled in Sheepshead Bay and opened his shop on Avenue Z in 1977.
You can watch Jerry tell his life story in this video created as college project by Eugene Vernikov.
https://youtu.be/uHcFCCX_rOI
During his time in Brooklyn, Jerry would often slip away from the shop and perform for audiences in hotels throughout New York State. He was a treasured presence at weddings and bar mitzvahs. Once, while staying at a hotel in Las Vegas, he ran into the King of Rock n Roll, Elvis Presley, while walking through the hotel’s lobby. Jerry convinced the rock legend to join him in a song and the pair quickly attracted a crowd, friends and family said.
“The guy covered the universe,” Burgo said of his friend’s ability to draw people in. “For a thousand years, you could not get another guy like that. But the big man upstairs called. So it was time to leave this earth for a better place, I guess. But while he was here, he was a champion without a doubt.”