ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. — A local St. Augustine man is sharing his father’s story only with Action News Jax.
Steve Martini’s father was a barber to five former presidents -- Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.
Martini, 77, tells Action News Jax he will never forget the day the Secret Service walked into his father’s barber shop in Washington, D.C.
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Without realizing it his father, Steve Martini Sr., found himself inside the Oval Office and face to face with president Dwight D. Eisenhower.
“You know, he was smoking his Camel cigarette and he said, ‘I want you to be my barber,’” Steve Martini Jr. said.
From that moment on, Martini Jr. said his life changed.
His humble family started out with a two-chair barbershop business only to grow to 32 shops across D.C., Virginia and Maryland.
Steve Martini Sr. was given the task of cutting the president’s hair even without the Secret Service around.
“If you’re cutting the hair of the president of the United States and nobody’s around, you got to be trustworthy,” Martini Jr. said.
From there he went on to cut the hair of four more presidents -- Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford.
Martini Jr. has a lot of photos of his father from his days in the White House, but perhaps his most priceless piece of memorabilia is a package full of hair clippings from these former presidents.
“This is JFK, he had the best hair,” he laughs, pulling out clippings from a yellow envelope.
Martini Jr. said his father didn’t discuss any confidential information about the conversations he held with these former presidents, but he did have a lot of influence when it came to issues like transportation, taxes and food prices.
He said that’s because his father was their connection to the outside world.
“Steve Martini said, ‘Look Mr. President, you asked me for a recommendation, you asked me for ideas, I’m going to tell you just like it is,’ and they would say, ‘That’s what we want Steve,’” Martini Jr. said.
Martini said he moved to St. Augustine when he was in his late 20s but saved all these items because he doesn’t want people to forget about the presidents and he wanted to preserve a piece of his father that will forever be a part of history.
“He was just an average guy, little barber that just happened to have a great personality a lot of sensitivity and he cared,” Martini Jr. said.
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