“Do you know Victor?” I asked a man waiting for his drink at The Scoop on 32nd Northwest, his dog waiting outside.

“Everybody knows Victor,” he replied.

Why didn’t I know Victor?

I’ve heard of Victor for years, dating back to his 100th birthday, except that he was only turning 90. They couldn’t make the party a surprise so the surprise was adding 10 years to his life.

As his daughter Karen says, “Everyone knows Pop. Everyone always knew him in the neighborhood because he walked everywhere.”

Victor Manarolla is just 92 years old now. He is still plying the streets of Ballard but now he’s behind the wheel of a shiny silver Volkswagen bug instead of on foot.

Victor is a regular at the The Scoop. He calls it the coffee shop even though he always orders tea. He’s a retired barber after 50 years in the business. He does errands in Ballard, purchases books of poetry at Abraxus books. He loves poetry because every poem tells a story.

On the weekend he and his daughter go south to the old neighborhood to shop at “the butcher, the bakery,” specifically Bob’s Meats and Columbia City Bakery. When he and his late wife, Signe, arrived in Seattle back in the mid-1940’s they lived off of Rainier Avenue South.

In the summer months Victor tends his vegetable garden; he has the soil ready now but won’t plant until he considers this winter to finally be at end. He grows corn and “lots of red beets.” All this I learn from Victor when I knock at his door on a chilly Friday morning.

Now if I was 92 years old and my daughter had arranged for a stranger to knock at the door with a notebook, pen and unknown motives I would be as reticent as Victor was with me. He was willing to tell me he was raised in Wyoming, graduated from high school there and worked in the coal mines for several years.

Although Victor’s own family and the family that raised him after his mother’s death were Italian, his wife was Finnish. She’d been raised in upper New York State but traveled west to be with relatives landing in his Wyoming town. “I’m leaving this little town” Signe told him, “whether you come with me or not.”

His wife had relatives in Seattle; they arrived here in 1945 or 1946. By then Victor had attended barber school in Salt Lake City. After working for a few years he was one of eight barbers at a shop in the University District. He made it a point to remember every customer’s name then and when he had his own shop on Greenwood at 105th. He raised his family here in Ballard.

On my way out of the trim house on a sloping street in Ballard he points out various photographs; the wedding picture of his wife’s parents, Signe’s high school graduation photo, a family photograph with his wife and two children. By the door he points out a fossil from Wyoming. I can’t resist passing my finger lightly over the perfect remains of a fish etched into the rock of an old riverbed. I realize on the way home that I forgot to ask him an important question.

An hour later I go to The Scoop for coffee and Kim Paxton, longtime barista and acknowledged “sun” of the neighborhood has already heard about my meeting with Victor. “He’s here isn’t he?” I said, peering around the espresso machine. Sure enough, he’s sitting at the counter, a small checked hat in his lap, car across the street.

He pats the stool next to his for me to sit down. “Did he tell you about his high school reunion?” Kim asks. “Did he tell you that we have oatmeal together every week?”

I look at Victor somewhat accusingly and he gives the kind of shrug that reminds you he’s Italian. That and how he pronounces Manarolla so that it seems to go up and down like a little roller coaster.

“He may have told you more about the interview than he said during the interview,” I say.

Victor shrugs again, definitely trying to hide a smile. He’s a small dapper man with steel-grey hair.

There really are plans to attend his high school reunion in Wyoming, the possibility of a trip to Italy in September. Everyone in the coffee shop weighs in his plans, but he’s among friends. “Don’t write about this,” he says several times, so I mostly put down my pen.

On Kim having oatmeal with him, “She’s very picky about mixing her food.” Discussion about Sunday brunch and Monday nights at Martins Off Madison where he is a fan of jazz performer Ruby Bishop. “She can sing or play anything you can think of - anything.”

After Victor leaves, Kim and I talk a bit about some of the regulars and how she used to look in on Victor after his wife died and before his daughter moved in with him. “You have to,” Kim says, referring to looking after people in the community, already planning a party with live music for a customer’s birthday in July.

I didn’t get to see Victor drive off in his little silver car but I’d remembered to ask him the question I needed to ask of him as a retired barber. “Who cuts your hair?”

So these things I now know. Gene the barber cuts Victor’s hair and Victor will not be a 100 until Jan. 24, 2007. The third time I met him I got a hug.

As my own father always says, “When I get to know you better I could really tell you some stories.” I sense stories ahead - because I know Victor.