I was born with red hair and lots of it. It shined like a new penny in the morning sun. It was pretty much unheard of to take little girls to a beauty show or boys to a barber. So the girls hair just grew and grew. Boys maybe had a trim from their Mom, hence the chat about the bowl cut. It seems my brother must have gone to the barber with my Dad as he really didn’t have the bowl look.
By the time I was five or six I had really long hair that my mom French braided on both sides. I would run through the house like a mad man when she took out the brush. When she caught me, she would try to brush out the tangles, part it down the middle, slop on lots of wave set then put in those braids tighter than a drum starting at the forehead. Each real fat braid was tied off with a rubber band.
I had one picture taken of me with my long hair unbraided. It was kinky from the braid and hung below my waist. I was sitting in front of the light colored oak dressing table with the big round mirror on the bench. I hope to find a copy of that picture someday.
My sister Nancy had light brown colored hair. She also had braids, but I think she had to do them herself as she was ten years older than me. I remember her sitting on the piano bench playing away with her braids all wrapped around her head.
recently, we saw the movie Public Enemy about John Dillinger in the 30’s. For years my mom wore hairdos like the ladies in that movie. She would wet her hair down with wave set, the 50’s product for hair gel. Then she would slap that hair down slick to her head and form waves with her fingers. She would hold them in place with long aluminum clips. It was such a thing to be able to form those big finger waves.
My Aunt Ruth would fix her hair on Saturday. When we went over there on that day she would have a big colorful cotton scarf wrapped around her head and tied in a big ole knot at her forehead. You could see the pin curls tacked down with bobby pins through the scarf opening. When my Mom and Nancy changed their hair styles to more curls, I remember watching them maneuver that strip of hair around their fingers and then open the bobby pin with their teeth and slip it over the curl.
In the 1960’s bobby pins were replaced with pink plastic rollers. You would fix your hair at night and sleep on those silly things. Hard plastic rollers replaced the soft ones. I’m surprised anyone could sleep wearing those. We also had a hair dryer which was a big plastic hat with elastic connect to a plastic tube. By that time ratting or back-combing your hair became popular to make your hair into a smooth bubble. Then you would spray the dickens out of it with hair spray so it wouldn’t move a hair during the day. Sometimes we clipped on a velvet simple bow right in the center by our bangs.
My hair always had a mind of its own. Pretty color, but it curled in places that never quite made a hairdo. Mom would send me to the beauty school to have them fix my hair on Saturday so it was ready for Sunday church. This occasionally included those smelly permanents. I’m sure the students did the best they could even though they were training to be beauticians, but it never was a pleasant experience for me. I would rather do anything than sit around a beauty shop listening to mundane talk about nothing with folks awing about this style or that and exclaiming how pretty everyone looks when all hairs were in place.
My son John saw a photo of me when I was about 13 with one of those hairdos and remarked how I looked like a boy with curls.
I finally escaped the 1950s hair styles when I went off to college and learned a few things from my roommates. I had long hair that finally fit into the style with a flip that was popular at the time. I also piled it up on top of my head in a ponytail and ratted it into a cascading fall from on top. It was interesting. We also wore wigs. How hot they were. We had cascading locks of all types in a variety of colors. Today people attach hair extensions. I remember giving my mom a cute shorter typed wig with grey hair. She was so nice she never said anything about the color, but I’m sure she didn’t enjoy being reminded of her changing hair color.
I mostly stayed away from those permanents for years. My friends and I all had Farah Fawcett dos for a while. We would bend over, brush our hair forward and gather really long hair in a clump about 5 or so inches from our forehead. Then trim where we were holding it. It did fall in layers just about like Farah’s. It seemed a lot more natural too.
About the time I was getting married in 1973 I had an inkling to get a permanent for my wedding day. My girl friend Char gave it to me. What was I thinking. I’m really surprised Stan still married me seeing all those curls on long red hair that day, but luckily he did. We moved to Texas where the humidity is as high as the temperature. It wasn’t too long after we moved that the curls were all cut off for short hair that I could deal with.
A couple years later I tried a permanent again. Stan’s nickname for me was Clarabelle for all the red curls I had. Mostly I keep away from permanents after that.
Nancy and Mom always had permanents. When the Afros were popular in the 1970’s they had transformed their hair into brillo pads. Even my brother-in-law Bob, wore permanent curls for years. His son Jim had long strawberry red hair curled up for his High School graduation.
Now, thanks to my daughter-in-law Rachel’s suggestion, I press out the natural curls every day with a flat iron. I happy and my grey-red hair seems manageable for a change. It is long enough that I can pull it into a pony tail on hot days.