Freddie Carlone Band

"I now have everything that money can buy. But what money can't buy I've always had " states Perry.

A nice homely sentiment. And, for a former small-town barber, a pleasingly humble one. But the hard facts behind this calmly accepted success story are there for the telling. So lets go back to 1923- the days of prohibition, "Rhapsody in Blue" and Al Capone- to Steve Fragapanes tonsorial saloon in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, and find Pierino Como, a nineteen –year old apprentice short back and sides merchant, getting rich the hard way on eight cents a day.

The only reason he got the job in the first place was because of his pleasant singing voice, which went free with a five-cent haircut. Steve Fragapane said the voice was all right but would he please mind saving it for the customers. When he wasn’t chopping hair there was always the floor to scrub, the rubbish to clean up and the windows to be washed. His father was a £7-a-week labourer at the local tin-plate factory, there were sixteen altogether in the Italian immigrant family and Pierino – or Perry, as he preferred to be called – as the seventh son of a seventh son was looked upon to bring fortune to the house- as well as money.

And he was well enough content with this.

"All I want is to one day own my own barber shop in Canonsburg," he said, "There can be nothing better in life that that". That was fine for Fragapane, but two people who would greatly influence the young would-be barber's life held more ambitious views. One was Roselle Belline, the girl he met on a high-school picnic, who was later to be his wife and who is today the distaff power behind the Como kingdom. "This Bing Crosby who is coming on is no better than you", she’d say in the late evenings when he’d finished his chores, "why don’t you join a band and sing for both our suppers?". But being raised in the tradition of Caruso, Perry thought of himself as a vocal lightweight, acceptable enough on third street, Canonsburg, but who’d want to know in New York, say.

Freddie Carlone, a brash band-leader whose nomadic career covered the country, had the answer. With Roselle’s help he lured Perry into an audition, talked him into a job as band vocalist and booked him on a coast-to-coast tour. So started ten years on the road.

In 1933 he called a halt. Enough was enough, and this was more than enough. He married Roselle, who’d been keeping the porch swing warm back home in Canonsburg. His son Ronnie was born in 1940, and that’s when Perry had a visionary experience, he says; "It was in a hotel one day, I saw a little kid of about eight wandering around on his own, he was talking to strangers in a desperate attempt to win human contact, he was the son of one of the band boys, and I decided that there was Ronnie in a few years time, and then I thought- not if I can help it." It was back to the old home town of Canonsburg for the Como family, where Perry achieved his youthful ambition, he opened a barber shop.

The rest is history as they say and so is the rest of the story. Just as we know it already. Its only a small piece but it does say something about about what he went through in those early days.