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Clear to partly cloudy. Low 43F. Winds WNW at 10 to 15 mph.

Tailor Frank Quintiliani, 88, at work in his old shop at 583 Main St., Haverhill.

MIKE SPRINGER/Staff photo Tailor Frank Quintiliani, 88, stands in the entrance of his old house and workshop at 583 Main St., Haverhill.

Tailor Frank Quintiliani, 88, holds a pair of labels, one from his father’s tailor shop in Strasbourg, France, and another from his own shop in Haverhill.

Frank Quantiliani and his twin brother are in this family portrait taken in 1947 in Strasbourg, France.

Courtesy Frank Quintiliani and longtime girlfriend Maryann Vaillancourt of Plaistow. She passed away on Jan. 1

Frank Quintiliani, right, stands with his identical twin, Anthony, as young U.S. Army medics.

Tailor Frank Quintiliani, 88, at work in his old shop at 583 Main St., Haverhill.

MIKE SPRINGER/Staff photo Tailor Frank Quintiliani, 88, stands in the entrance of his old house and workshop at 583 Main St., Haverhill.

Tailor Frank Quintiliani, 88, holds a pair of labels, one from his father’s tailor shop in Strasbourg, France, and another from his own shop in Haverhill.

Frank Quantiliani and his twin brother are in this family portrait taken in 1947 in Strasbourg, France.

Courtesy Frank Quintiliani and longtime girlfriend Maryann Vaillancourt of Plaistow. She passed away on Jan. 1

Frank Quintiliani, right, stands with his identical twin, Anthony, as young U.S. Army medics.

If Frank Quintiliani were to become a superhero, it’s clear who he would be: Tailor Man.

In truth, he already is a super tailor and his heroic qualities abound.

At 16, not knowing how to speak English, he crossed the Atlantic Ocean on a ship bound for America and made a life from needle and thread.

At 88 years old, he’s still making this life. He can cook, too. He made ziti and homemade meatballs and sauce for 40 people to eat on Super Bowl Sunday.

He first learned to sew and make alterations as a child in Strasbourg, France — before, during and after World War II.

His father was a tailor, and the Quintiliani family stitched for the French. Then the Germans. Then, thank God, for the Allies.

Young Frank experienced the war’s hardships and horrors. Hunger, bombs and the deportation of Jewish friends to death camps. Late at night in his bedroom, he heard Germans breaking doors to arrest Jews. The screaming and crying was unforgettable.

The Quintiliani family, nine children and their parents, Carlo and Pasqualina, lived on the fifth floor of a building. Carlo’s tailor shop was on the third floor.

The Quintiliani parents were born and raised in a village in Italy but moved to Strasbourg for better opportunities for tailors.

When Carlo died in 1947, of liver disease, people hollered the news from open windows up and down the street.

“Mr. Quintiliani died. Mr. Quintiliani died.”

Young Frank clapped his hands over his ears and ran home crying. His father was just getting ready to move the family into a big house where the whole family were to work as tailors.

Once you start working as a tailor, you cannot stop, Frank Quintiliani says.

He has been a tailor for 80 years and continues even now at his new home in a senior living residence. His customers’ phone calls keep coming.

He also gets calls and visits from family and friends. Quintiliani and his friends like to play cards — forty-fives, poker and pinochle. He also plays the drums in the Sons of Italy Drum and Bugle Corps, and he paints.

His greatest skill is tailoring.

For 61 years, Quintiliani operated his business, Quintiliani Quality Tailor, in Haverhill, most of the years at his house at 583 Main St. His wife left him after 17 years — they were married in 1960 — and he finished raising their four sons.

His tailor shop was in the basement. He must have climbed the stairs 100,000 times.

It was good exercise, he says. Great exercise. The best. It led him to and from the work that he first learned from his father and the rest of the family.

“My father was a super tailor,” he says. “My older brother was a super tailor. My older sister was a super tailor. My other sister was a super tailor. Then my twin brother is a super tailor and I’m a super tailor, and that’s the end of it.”

Quintiliani is thin and moves and speaks with quickness, a deftness that is direct and in the moment.

In November, he moved into Benchmark Senior Living at Haverhill Crossings.

The move took him by surprise, he says, but he accepted it. Resilience is second nature to Frank the tailor. Besides, he has his work.

“The show just goes on,” he says. “The show does not stop.”

Within days, he had his sewing machine, thimble, thread, chalk, pins and needles with him.

Benchmark’s activities director, Jocelyn Plummer, says that he has given a presentation to the residence’s Stitcher Sisters knitting group.

Quintiliani likes people to feel good about looking good. He says he’s honored and privileged to contribute to this feeling. He takes pride in his work.

He’s not so conceited as to feign modesty. He knows he’s good at what he does and there are few left who can do what he does.

Truth is, there never were a lot of those who could work needle and thread like the Quintilianis, he says.

Frank’s calling card is his handwork. It’s flawless. He’ll work his magic altering a pair of dress pants, and you won’t see where the fabric ends and Frank’s hand stitching begins.

His first customer after he moved to Benchmark was a referral from another customer.

Bob Brown called Quintiliani late in the week and brought him three new pairs of dress pants to shorten by Monday.

Quintiliani called him two days early on Saturday and told him his pants were ready.

Brown, of Groveland, and his wife scoped the stitching.

“It was exquisite work,” Brown says.

The price was reasonable, too. It cost $45 for the three pairs. He’s going to bring him another pair of pants.

In a funny coincidence, Brown — like Quintiliani — is also an identical twin. Brown’s twin is left-handed and he is right-handed.

Not only that, but the fellow who referred him to Quintiliani is also a twin.

Quintiliani refers to himself as the “last of the Mohicans,” though that is not entirely true.

His twin brother, Anthony, who lives in Boca Raton, Florida, still does tailoring on occasion.

By the way, who is the better tailor, Frank or Anthony?

“We’re twins,” Anthony said in a phone interview. “We’re equal.”

Anthony has lived in Boca Raton since 1971. The brothers talk all the time.

At age 16, they boarded a steam-powered ship, the SS Washington, wearing overcoats far too big. Frank played the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise,” on his harmonica as the ship steamed from port.

The first day out of Le Havre, France, the brothers opened a door and saw white tablecloths and chandeliers and people eating big breakfasts. That’s for the rich people, Frank told his twin.

At dinner, they looked in the same dining room and saw a mammoth roast beef. That’s for the rich people, Frank told his twin.

The next day, a ship porter checked on the boys, asking if they were OK — why weren’t they eating?

Turned out, they were welcome to eat. They went to the dining room, and everyone was glad to see them and they ate all they could.

At the end of the trip, a man told Frank they were suppose to tip the waiter $5 and the chambermaid $5. Frank had only $6 and was upset.

That night on the dance floor, the ship hosted a horse race, with wooden horses. The entries moved on squares based on rolls of the dice.

Frank won $12. He tipped the waiters $5 and the chambermaid $5.

Frank and Anthony were taken in by their Aunt Mary and Uncle Gennaro in Haverhill. Gennaro was Carlo’s brother.

Four years later, in 1953, the aunt and uncle took in another Quintiliani child, Liliane.

Like her brothers, she went to Haverhill public schools during the day and then in the evening to night school so she could learn English.

Someone had made fun of the way she spoke English and she burned with determination to learn English.

She still lives in Haverhill. Her married name is Nicolosi.

She says her brother Frank is a character. A good guy.

“We had a hard life,” she says. “When we were in Strasbourg, we had a hard life.”

Before she and her twin brothers were born, a brother died.

Their mother was preparing food and had hot oil frying sliced potatoes on the stove, and she went down to the third floor to see her husband about something.

Meanwhile, their young boy reached up to the pan to see what was cooking. The pan tipped over and scalded him, and he died.

Their mother always blamed herself for the mishap.

To console her, an artist gave her an oil painting he made of a saint and a child. Frank has the painting. It sits in his bedroom.

Frank, Anthony and Liliane were the only members of their family to come to America.

Shortly after Frank and Anthony arrived, their uncle took them to a men’s store to buy them suits for Easter. This is when suits were made by tailors.

The salesman said it was too close to Easter; he couldn’t get them done in time.

Frank noticed a room with a sewing machine and told his uncle that he and his brother could make their suits.

The salesman let the teenagers have at it, and they made the suits. The shop ended up hiring them to work part time.

A few years later, during the Korean War, the twin brothers went in the U.S. Army and were made medics, probably because of their stitching skills.

They could administer stitches to soldiers’ wounds. Frank also stitched the stripes on his fellow soldiers’ uniforms when they got promoted.

Part of the time, the Quintiliani twins were stationed in Germany, a short distance from where they were raised, over the border in Strasbourg, France.

Frank, when he got to his post in Germany, traveled to his home city in Strasbourg to visit his family.

When he got off the train, someone threw a snowball at him and hollered in French, “Yankee, go home.”

Frank hollered back, in French, “Je suis né ici!” I was born here!

After Frank got out of the service, he went back to tailoring, doing work for men’s stores in Boston and the Merrimack Valley.

Then he opened his own business. He had saved money during the 1950s and bought a brand-new car in 1959, a Ford Galaxy, for cash.

When he was still driving a car, the license plate on it was TAILOR.

One time, in 1969 a young woman came to his shop and wanted to knew if he could shorten a leather skirt.

“Okay,” he said, “what do you want?”

She wanted him to shorten it 10 inches.

“Huh, what, are you kidding, 10 inches — that’s too much,” he said.

She said it’s a new style, coming from New York. It’s called the mini skirt.

Frank the tailor can do anything, so he made a mini skirt. Then her friend wanted one, and he made her one, too.

Frank the tailor speaks four languages. French, Italian, German and English.

All day long, in his mind, he translates into the different languages the things he hears in conversations and on radio and television.

He’s learning a fifth language now, Spanish, by talking to people at Benchmark. It’s not so different from Italian, he says.

He has said goodbye to his longtime place of business on South Main Street.

It’s easy to see what kind of work was done there.

In November, a vintage treadle sewing machine draped with bunting still sat on the lawn.

A metal frame from an old sewing machine hung from the side of the front vestibule.

From the frame hung a tall sign. From top to bottom, it spelled the word “Tailor.”

Frank the tailor’s schedule is different now. He gets up around 7:30 a.m., eats his breakfast in his room and reads the newspaper.

“Then I relax,” he says. “If somebody comes, I take care of them. I make phone calls. I call my sons. They call me.”

His longtime girlfriend Maryann Vaillancourt of Plaistow passed away on Jan. 1. It was not a good beginning to the year. He misses her.

They met in 1999, Friday the 13th in August. She came into his shop and wanted him to shorten a skirt. He still has the customer card she filled out.

He gets exercise by walking around the building once a day. It’s about a quarter-mile, he says.

He has had more customers call for work. A guy named Mahoney wanted some Army insignia patches sewn on a shirt from his days in the service.

The shirt has patches all over it that Frank had sewn on earlier.

“He found two more that I had to squeeze in there,” Frank says.

Frank the tailor has gone through a lot of changes in his life, especially lately with the move and losing his girlfriend.

“As long as I have my machine, I can do some work.”

He also cooks an array of Italian dishes. His meatballs and pasta e fagioli are award winning. For the Super Bowl he made a beautiful sauce and meatballs and Italian sausage and ziti for 40 people at Benchmark.

A few years ago, he cooked spaghetti and meatballs for 400 people. It was a fundraiser for the Sons of Italy.

Whew, that was a job, he said.

It sounded like he was glad he was a tailor, and didn’t cook for a living.

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