The Golden Razor Tecumseh Mall

We would like to take this opportunity to tell you a little about our history. The Golden Razor was founded by Sabin Maich in 1970. Sabin was born in 1921 in a small ethnic Romanian village to extremely poor farmers who had lost most of their land. The village barber was the only person his mother was able to persuade to educate him free of charge, so Sabin began his career as an apprentice in a farming village traveling from house to house before daybreak to shave his guests before they went to labour in the fields. By age 17, Sabin had earned his barber papers and was ready to set out to seek a better way of life. In his village anyone seeking prosperity would immigrate to Austria or Germany to work for higher wages and so did Sabin. However, his timing was extremely unfortunate as the year was 1939 and world war was about to unfold. He found himself trapped for the next six years in wartime Germany, narrowly escaping internment in a Nazi labour camp and surviving fire bombing raids. With the war's end came opportunity and Sabin soon earned himself a position managing a barber salon in a US military base and within a short time he was managing four barber shops and a beauty salon for the US military. But prosperity left as quickly as it came with the US military withdrawal from Europe in 1948; as the American military bases closed so did the salons. So with a letter of recommendation from an American Army Corneal, $50 and the address of an uncle in Canada, Sabin set out to make his new life here in Windsor. Things were difficult a first, he was granted a farm visa which required him to live in the county so he had to walk downtown every day to his job at Folian's Barber Shop (he claimed to never have been late for work!). When Mr. Folian died his widow asked Sabin to manage the business and she eventually sold it to him; the shop was then renamed Maich's Barber Salon. Sabin had also met a young woman named Suzanna Rohn who he soon married. Suzanna had also been displaced by the Second World War and was forced from her home in Hungary. Her father had died at an early age and her mother was forced to look after her two young daughters alone. By age 13 she had been labouring in a Russian work camp in Soviet occupied Germany until her mother bribed a Polish Guard to smuggle her young daughters over to the American zone. The plan did not go well and the trio found themselves lost in the woods until they came upon a guard house. Not knowing where they were, a decision was made to give themselves up to whomever was there. Fortunately, their luck had changed and they found at the post American soldiers, who generously helped them. Soon Suzanna was on her way to Canada to stay with her uncle in Windsor where she met Sabin while attending at night school to learn English. Sabin and Suzanna’s story then takes on a very familiar path that so many thousands of new Canadians have experienced: many years of hard work and long hours, while starting a new family in a new country, with little help other than the kindness of people who they encountered in their daily lives.