Hair!

Candelyn:  Tell me about how people did their hair.  What kinds of barrettes did you have?  Were there pony-tail holders?  What kinds of haircuts were in style.  Did people dye their hair?  Did you ever have long hair?  How did you curl your hair?  What kinds of hair products did you put into it?  Were there salons?  Or just the barber?  Oh, and tell about the time you cut your own hair!  (Smile!)

When I was a toddler my mother would use Nestle's hair curl product on my hair in order to make it curly.  I think it is the same company that today produces hot chocolate and other food products.  In any case, it didn't change my wispy, slightly wavy hair.

My daughter found  this ad from the era.  Reading it would make any mother want to buy some.

My mother's wish to have a daughter with curly hair came true with the birth of my sister when I was 2 1/2 years old.  She had really curly hair and it was a very beautiful shade of dark red.  As soon as her hair had grown in, it lay in little round curls all over her head.   I can remember people holding her on their laps and pulling on one curl at a time  and letting them spring back.  I don't remember being jealous of this, but my mother says that she remembers that I was. 

The movie star idol of the time was Shirley Temple.  She had large ringlets that bounced around as she danced and sang.  Hair entrepreneurs invented some fat aluminum curlers that closed with a rubber ring on a wire.  For years I had to sleep in these curlers so I could have ringlets that bounced.  Shirley Temple is also the reason I took tap dancing lessons for two years when I was three and four years old and again for a short while when I was 8 or 9 yrs. old.   

These curlers with the rubber fasteners were the kind I slept on for many years.

Now for the infamous story of me cutting my own hair.  In 1938, when I was four years old, we were living in Safford.    My mother had us all trained to take naps everyday.  My father even joined in on the weekends.  One day I remember wandering about the house during nap time.  I no longer remember why I got the idea to cut my hair, but I clearly had decided to do it.  I couldn't find the scissors so I woke my father up and asked him where were the scissors.  He told me that they were in the top drawer of a buffet or dresser or some piece of furniture.  I found them exactly where he told me and I pulled a strand of hair from above my forehead and cut it off close to the scalp.  Being a well trained daughter, I returned the scissors to its rightful place. 

A few days or maybe a week later, at another nap time, my father noticed something strange about my hairline.  He called my mother to come and see all the new hair that was growing in.  My mother took one look at it and realized that this wasn't new hair and they both looked upset.  They sat me down and seriously quizzed me. Feeling perfectly innocent, I told them that I had cut my hair.  My mother wanted to know where I had gotten the scissors which she kept hidden from us children. I even shared that my father had told me where they were.  They wanted to know why I had cut my hair.  I told them, that I didn't know why.  This was as close to a police interrogation as I have ever come. They even asked me for the evidence of what I had done.  I told them that I had thrown my hair away in the box beside the back door where we kept  wood for the stove.  Sure enough, they found it and put it in a little piece of cellophane.  I never saw it again until after I retired in my late 50's, when my father gave it to me.  I still have this piece of hair in its original cellophane wrapper in my keepsake box.  

I have never had a haircut in a barber shop and as a child never had a haircut at a salon.  My mother cut all of the children's hair, even the boys' hair, although my father also cut the boys' hair.  We had barber combs, barber scissors, a hand clipper, a high stool to sit on, and an old white shirt to keep the hair off of your clothes. 

 My brother, Arman, had beautiful "gold fish" colored, curly hair.  My parents couldn't bear to cut it off so they only trimmed it and left it in short curls until he was at least three years old.  One weekend, my mother had gone to her home town to help settle up her parents estate.   My father decided to give my brother a proper short haircut.  After he got down from the stool, he reached up and felt the back of his neck.  With a big smile on his face he said, "I have whiskers," because feeling his dad's face when he needed a shave was the only other time he had felt that texture. 

We didn't use bar soap to wash our hair, but had some kind of shampoo.  Evidently shampoo was expensive, because I still think of my mother's instructions almost every time I wash my hair.  You only need a "peanut size" dab for the first shampoo, then you rinse and use another "peanut size" dab to work up a foam for the final shampoo.

Breck hair ads were very popular when I was a teen.

I don't remember anyone wearing pony tails when I was young so we  didn't have pony tail holders, either.  We had bobby pins, barrettes, rubber bands, and ribbons.  One year for Christmas, we opened the box of new and used paper to begin wrapping gifts and there among the used paper was a brand new barrette that I had received for the previous  Christmas.  We must have had quite a few barrettes since I hadn't missed it in a year.

We had barrettes exactly like the top two ones and maybe the one in front,too.

Hair styles for me, when I was pre-school age, were wispy every-which-way, often held back with a barrette in the shape of a bluebird or perhaps some flowers.  Later, I had the Shirley Temple ringlets also held to one side with a plastic barrette.  

One hairstyle that I liked a lot during elementary school, was when my mother would part my hair in the middle and would make two small braids of the front hair and pull them to the back and hold the two braids together with a rubber band.  The rest of my hair just hung down naturally.  This was around 4th grade, I think.  This was the longest hair I  had as a child.  

After I was in my late 40's I started wearing my hair long, often in a bun but sometimes just hanging down.   I remember it getting caught behind my back when I was driving.   I planned to wear it long as an old lady wrapped around my head in braids, but after I broke my leg and it got so tangled up in the hospital that no one could comb it out, I gave up and let them cut it.  I have kept it short ever since.

Sometime around 5th or 6th grade, my mother took me to Rilla Jarvis's beauty parlor that she ran out of her home in Snowflake.  She had a big electric contraption that would give you a "permanent."  A separate wire went to each curler in your hair and Rilla would set a timer.  It was a pretty scary experience.  My mother wanted to get her money's worth so she said to make it extra curly so it would last longer.  She always believed, the curlier the better.  There are numerous pictures of me with another fuzzy permanent on our grand tour of the west in 1947. 

After we moved to Phoenix, Toni came out with home permanents and my mother used these on me a few times.  I can still remember the smell and never liked the results.  I only remember getting a permanent as an adult 2 or 3 times.  My hair curls very easily and once a permanent was so frizzy that it turned into an Afro.  Luckily they were in style and so it wasn't the disaster it might have been.

When I first began to see gray hairs, I  would just pull them out.  Eventually, I had my hair dyed at a beauty salon.   At first it looked alright, but after about a week, it  looked awful and so I have never tried it again.  When I was a child, ladies with gray hair would put a blue tint on it.  I never see anyone doing that anymore.  I wonder why.

Sometimes my mother would curl our hair with this curling iron that she had from before she got married.   This was a summer time solution to curling your hair  because you needed a kerosene lamp to use it  You put it in the chimney of a kerosene lamp and when it got hot you rolled your hair around it and clamped it until you thought the hair was curled.  It worked just like the electric curling irons today, only you had to reheat it before every curl.

During high school, almost every night, teenagers set their hair into pin curls using bobby pins to hold them in place.  You first wound the hair around a finger set tight against your scalp and then with the other hand picked up the bobby pin, opened it on your teeth and then slipped it over the pin curl. It took a lot of bobby pins to do all of your hair.  I remember being angry at my sister who had gone to bed earlier and had used up more than her fair share of the bobby pins.  Magazine articles warned you that you were going to ruin your teeth opening the bobby pins, but there was really no other way to open them using only one hand. 

 Someone invented aluminum clips for pin curls and they became popular so that you didn't ruin your teeth.


I have never had enough money or inclination to have regular beauty parlor appointments, except  for one period of time when I was in the Philippines with the U.S. Peace Corps.  Since I was "Miss Rayna" every Saturday morning on  a children's television program,  I did get my hair set and my nails done once a week.  I think I also got a pedicure for the first time in my life.  Only recently, at age 77, did I get my second pedicure because my nails have become so thick and my hands so weak that I can't cut my own toenails. 

I guess I could close this blog with the nursery tale quote," by the hair of your chinny chin chin" from the Three Little Pigs, but at my age talking about hairs on your chin is a very sensitive subject.