Beloved Bay View barber José Ortiz dies at 88
Call him the barber of Kinnickinnic. Or José. Or Amado. Or the guy with the blue VW van who always sat outside his Bay View barbershop watching the neighborhood.
Joseph Amado Ortiz, a fixture of the Milwaukee neighborhood and a Korean War veteran, died Monday at age 88. He befriended countless Milwaukeeans and cultivated a unique sense of community inside José’s Barber Extraordinaire, friends and family members said.
“Every small town has that character … that neighborhood staple,” said Bay View resident Zack Holder. “José was that guy.”
He was a man of the people who saw everyone for who they really were – without judgment, his son Nicolaus Ortiz said. Brothers Nicolaus and Christopher Ortiz have been running the shop for the past few years and now feel the loss of their father has left a gaping hole in the shop’s spirit.
Ortiz took on dozens of apprentices over his career, focused on helping young barbers make it on their own, Nicolaus said. But the impact Ortiz made in Milwaukee is far greater than training barbers. He changed the lives of everyone he met, his family wrote in his obituary.
Andy Oren, a retired Methodist pastor who lives in the Bay View neighborhood, met Ortiz 10 years ago in the Anodyne Coffee shop on South Kinnickinnic Avenue. Ortiz talked to anyone and everyone who sat down at the counter, Oren said.
“Once you got to know him, you were in. You were his friend,” Oren said.
Now, after his death, Oren’s thinking about Ortiz’s wittiness and great storytelling skills, and how lucky he was to know Ortiz. Oren’s wife cut his hair for 20 years – “then José came into my life,” he said.
Even in the smallest of encounters, Ortiz made an impact on those who met him. Holder wasn’t a close friend but knew Ortiz as “one of those classic old neighborhood dudes.”
“He was the king of KK,” Holder said in a tweet.
Ortiz was a philosopher on top of his duties as a barber, father and grandfather, his family said in his obituary. His friends agreed.
“He always posed those unanswerable questions,” Oren said.
Music, politics, religion – “everything’s on the table” inside the shop, Holder said.
A Korean War veteran who served in the Air Force and ran for office in various elections, Ortiz always had an opinion about the day’s news he’d share with his coffee buddies or his clients.
Tom Haudricourt, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Brewers beat writer, saw this firsthand. He visited the shop after serving as Ortiz’s guardian on a Stars and Stripes Honor Flight to Washington, D.C., in May 2018.
Haudricourt spent the day with Ortiz at the Korean War Veterans Memorial, laughing at Ortiz’s jokes and talking baseball. He remembers the veterans’ triumphant return to Milwaukee as people cheered and a band played in Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport. Ortiz was so excited by the spirit of the crowd that he leaped from the wheelchair Haudricourt pushed through the concourse, walking the distance himself and leaving Haudricourt carting an empty chair.
And he remembers when Ortiz and the other honor flight vets visited Miller Park, meeting Brewers players and receiving jerseys with their names. Ortiz was overjoyed to meet pitcher Jeremy Jeffress and sit in the press box with Haudricourt.
Meeting Ortiz and taking the pilgrimage to D.C. was “one of the greatest things I’ve ever done,” Haudricourt said. “He was a tremendous guy.”
In his later years, his sons would bring Ortiz into the shop. He was a larger-than-life figure who commanded a room.
“José would just sit there and hold court,” Haudricourt said.
His barbershop lives on after his death. It’s in many ways a social institution, a vestige of the old-fashioned value of a communal gathering space, those who knew Ortiz said. It provided a space for people to tell stories and share ideas and talk to each other.
Ortiz cut the hair of politicians and athletes and average Joes in his nearly 60 years in barbershops around Milwaukee. Growing up as a fly on the wall listening to clients tell stories, Nicolaus Ortiz gleaned profound lessons about the world that he still keeps in mind today as he cuts hair in his father’s shop.
It’s fitting that the man who touched the lives of so many in his 88 years left an indelible legacy in his community.
Every time Oren sits at the Anodyne counter for a cup of coffee, he said he’ll think of Ortiz. Each time Holder passes the barbershop on his Sunday morning errands along Kinnickinnic, he’ll be reminded of Ortiz. And Haudricourt, who regrets he must miss Saturday’s funeral services to cover the Brewers’ weekend series against the Washington Nationals, will visit the Korean War Veterans Memorial on his trip to D.C. and pay tribute to Ortiz.
He is survived by his four children, Christopher, Nicolaus, Angelita and Teresa; three grandchildren; and two siblings. Funeral services take place from 4 to 6 p.m. Saturday at Niemann/Suminski Funeral Home, 2486 S. Kinnickinnic Ave.