Thelma Brown and Pauline Young
Narrators
Philip Kretsedemas
Interviewer
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May 21, 1997
TB: When I started, I was trying to figure out what to do, what I wanted to work at, what I could
do to work by myself. My sister started first. She came home one evening and she said, “I’m
going to beauty school.” I said, “Oh! Where are you going?” She told me where she was going,
down to the Hollywood School.
PY: Where was that at?
TB: Down on Hennepin [Avenue] and Seventh [Street]. I went to bed that night and I said,
“That’s something I would like. So I said, well, I’m going, too.” [Laughter]
PY: [Laughter]
TB: I was working downtown and I started school. I went there three evenings a week. I went
there till just before the time to take the examination. Then, I quit my job and I went days to get
there quick . . . faster.
PY: How long did you have to go then?
TB: At that time, we didn’t have to put in but 650 hours.
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PY: We had a lot more time that we had to put in.
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TB: Our book was about like that. [Laughter] Now, I bet it’s like that.
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PY: Yes, right. [Laughter]
TB: I went and finished.
PY: How long did it take you finish working the part time?
TB: It must have been about two years just going three hours a night a week.
PY: I did it in eleven months. I guess I was in a hurry to get it through. I wasn’t working at the
time, so I just went full time.
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TB: I worked a little over a year just going evenings.
PY: Who did you go to work for when you came out for your apprenticeship? Who did you work
with?
TB: I didn’t work for awhile. Then, I went to Ohio.
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PY: Ohio, oh, okay.
TB: I went to Toledo. I was there about ten years. [unclear] license. When I got there, they were
just beginning to have state board there.
PY: Did you have to change over?
TB: Yes, I had to take the state board there to get my Ohio license.
PK: Was that your first job in Ohio?
TB: Yes. I stayed there ten years in Toledo. When we left there, we went to Akron and I stayed
there about ten years.
PY: When did you come to Minnesota?
TB: I came back here in 1956, I believe it was.
PK: Why did you travel to Ohio? Was it that you couldn’t get work here or you just decided to
move?
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TB: My husband went there, so I went, too.
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PK: When you moved here, did you set up your own shop?
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TB: Yes, that was out on Sixth [Street] and Lyndale [Avenue], Lyndale and Plymouth [Avenue].
PY: I didn’t go into school until 1961. I worked for Dorothy James after I came out of school. I
worked for her through my apprenticeship. Then, after I got my manager’s license, my son and I
opened up our own shop at James [Avenue] and Plymouth.
TB: Where the shop is now?
PY: No. That’s on Newton [Avenue] and Plymouth. I had two shops since then. The first one
was right there on the corner of James and Plymouth. It was a white shop and they were going
out of business, so we bought them out. Then, we stayed there for about three years. Our
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business got real good so we opened up.
[break in the interview]
TB: Oh, yes.
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PY: . . . there. In the old shop, we had three chairs and at the one on Sheridan [Avenue], we got
five chairs. We stayed there until Chubby built where we finally closed up there on Newton and
Plymouth.
PY: We just opened up the Young Brothers and the Satin Doll together.
PK: Mrs. Brown, what was the name of your shop?
TB: Thelma’s Beauty Bar.
PK: Were you in that location the entire time until you closed?
TB: I was there ten or twelve years. Then, my husband got sick and I moved my shop at home
and that’s where I closed up.
PK: I’ve heard that a lot of women began doing hairdressing at home. Did you find that that was
true, too?
TB: Yes. I liked working at home.
PY: By the time you were doing hair at home, were you still able to get a license? After awhile,
the state board wouldn’t let you do hair at home anymore.
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PY: I see.
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TB: As long as I didn’t have a sign up.
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TB: That was all right with me because I was cutting down on my work anyway.
PK: What was the neighborhood like when you moved here in the 1950s and the kind of
customers you had?
TB: Oh, up and down Plymouth Avenue were a lot of business places, storefronts. I was upstairs
over a second-hand furniture store on the corner of Plymouth and Lyndale, where Dr. Wright
was.
PY: Oh, yes, that’s the dentist.
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TB: Yes.
PY: When you were still there, was it still a predominantly Jewish area?
TB: Mixed.
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PK: Were your customers fairly mixed, too?
TB: I had all colored customers.
PK: At that time, were there quite a few other African-American beauticians serving the black
community or were there just a few?
TB: Let’s see, I was there. I don’t know what other colored shops were there.
PY: There wasn’t too many, were there?
TB: I don’t think there were.
PY: No. I know when I went into business, there weren’t too many.
TB: I think at one time, there was a shop up there near where Estes used to be on Humboldt
[Avenue] and Plymouth.
PY: I don’t remember him.
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TB: Somebody had a shop on Humboldt just off of Plymouth going back toward Olson
[Memorial Highway] but I don’t know who it was. I think that was all until you opened up there.
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PY: I know there wasn’t too many when we started. I know you were there and—
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TB: Katherine Deite was on Humboldt.
PK: Katherine Deite?
TB: Yes.
PY: She just died. She worked for us for awhile, too.
PK: Obviously now, there are a lot of black beauty shops and barbershops around. Do you
remember about when it began to change, when you began to see a lot more businesses open up
doing hairdressing?
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TB: In the later years, quite a few opened up, quite a few out south.
PK: Was that by the time you had gone back to work at home or do you think that that
happened while you were still in your shop?
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TB: I think it happened while I was still in my shop. Out around Fourth Avenue, around ThirtyEighth [Street] and Fourth, out in there, there were quite a few.
PY: Yes, two of my brothers-in-law were there on Thirty-Eighth and Fourth, two of the Young
brothers.
TB: Yes, and what was that girl’s name who had a shop on Fourth Avenue?
PY: I know who you’re talking about . . . Liz Caraway. [unclear]
TB: [Laughter]
PY: She was there for awhile, too, right there on Fourth Avenue.
TB: Betty had one out there on Fourth Avenue.
PY: Betty who? Jones?
TB: Betty Jones, yes. I think my sister-in-law went there for a long time.
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TB: No.
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PK: I have a question about the home work. I know you mentioned that you got licensed before
you opened your shop but were you doing hairdressing at home and learning the trade, learning
how to dress hair, by yourself at home before you got the license?
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PK: You learned it all at school?
TB: I learned it at school.
PK: Okay. Do you think that most women you knew really learned it at school or were there a
lot of sort of what they called the bootleg barbers and beauticians that were doing it at home?
TB: I guess they were all just hairdressers before we had to have our license. Anybody could do
it.
PY: Before the license was demanded, there was a lot of people—they didn’t call it bootlegging
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then; they were just doing hair.
TB: Just doing hair.
PY: After the license, then it was bootlegging. They called it bootleg then. A lot of the
beauticians—I know of some—resented—
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TB: Having to get the license.
PY: —paying for the license and working for the license and then these others was still doing
hair and didn’t have a license.
PK: Did a lot of these women go ahead and get licenses or did some of them just fall out of the
business?
TB: Some quit and most of them got a license who wanted to stay with it.
PY: Who wanted to do hair. Those that bootlegged never even bothered to get a license.
TB: They took chances.
PY: I had one operator—I won’t tell her name—work for me and she worked for me for quite
awhile. She quit the business and she didn’t even keep her license up, but she was still doing hair
out of her house.
PK: Something else I wanted to ask, too, Mrs. Brown, was the size of your shop. About how
many people did your shop service?
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TB: I just took a few of my customers after I moved home because I just turned one of my
bedrooms into a shop. I cut a door in it so that they wouldn’t have to come through the house.
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PY: How many chairs did you have in your other shop when you were in the business?
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TB: When I was down on Lyndale, I had two—just two of us.
PK: Something I’ve asked Mrs. Young about, one of the big themes in barbershops is how the
men get together, and they talk, and they talk about everything. Did you find that women did a
lot of talking in your shop?
TB: If the operator talked with them. But if the operator didn’t talk, they soon hushed up.
PY: That’s what I found, too, in ours. The only time that they really would get into a real
discussion was if something special was going on on TV.
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TB: Yes, if something happened and everybody knew about it.
PY: Right, yes. Otherwise, it was always the beautician and the customer that the conversation.
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TB: I know where I worked in Akron, there were seven of us in there and, do you know what? I
had the mother. I had two of her daughters and I was doing their hair for, I guess, for four or five
years before I knew they were family.
PY: Oh, is that right? [Laughter]
TB: [Laughter] That’s how much we talked and everybody in the shop. It wasn’t a gossipy shop.
PK: What kind of people were your customers? Were they a lot of regular working people or
did you have a lot of elites in the community?
TB: Both.
PK: Did they ever come in and talk business or did they just talk personal when they did talk?
TB: Nothing sensational. If they had anything private that they wanted to talk about, they’d tell
you but they didn’t tell it to everybody in there.
PY: It was very customer and operator—a secret thing, I guess you would call it. I had
customers talked and told me a lot of personal things about their life, but it stayed with me.
TB: It didn’t go no farther.
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PK: No, that was a code of the shop: you don’t spread anything that you hear from your
customer.
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[break in the interview]
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PK: So, you thought that the men really gossiped more than the women?
TB: Yes.
PY: [Laughter] Didn’t you think so?
TB: I certainly do—still think so. [Laughter]
PY: If you wanted to know anything, if you were a woman, if you went into the shop, you may
not have heard a lot, but if you wanted to stand back out of the corner someplace where they
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couldn’t see you, you could hear plenty.
TB: Oh, yes.
TB: [Laughter]
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PY: I think I was telling him that with my office being back there, with my door open, I could
hear everything that was going on in the barbershop, because my office was closer to his shop.
Some of the conversations I would hear over there, boy, would raise your hair up. [Laughter]
PY: I’d be back there laughing. I said, “If they only knew that I could hear what they were
saying!” I used to tell Chubby about it and he would kind of laugh. He knew that I could hear
them but he didn’t stop it because it—
TB: That’s his barbershop.
PY: Yes.
PK: I know people came there to get their hair done but did any social activities—did people
leave flyers for events.
TB: Oh, yes.
PY: Yes, they did at ours, too. We had a place where they could pin up stuff that was going on.
PK: You always had the TV there? Did people have TVs in the shops?
TB: Yes.
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PY: In the women’s shop, you would find, if you had the TV on with some of these soaps [soap
operas], maybe there would be two or three people—
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TB: Listening.
PY: . . . listening to that one soap. Then, you might get some discussion about the soap, and they
would talk about that, and everybody would get to laughing. You’d think that it was real people
the way they were talking about it.
TB: Yes.
PY: Harold, the fellow that was in there with us, used to laugh at us all the time. He would say,
“Oh, my goodness, here they go with that.” We finally got him interested and then he was up
there talking about it.
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TB: [Laughter]
PY: That’s about the only time you would, perhaps, get a conversation of different ones in the
shop.
TB: Yes.
PY: No.
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PK: It always sounds like a lot of the things people were talking about were relationships,
talking about personal things. They wouldn’t be talking about, necessarily, politics or issues?
TB: It would all depend.
PY: I don’t know about your shop, but in our shop, that was a “no, no” with the operator. A
customer, if they wanted to discuss politics or religion, you let them do it. It’s okay but you
didn’t take a lot of part in it, because it creates problems.
TB: That’s right.
PY: Especially if you disagreed with them.
TB: Yes.
PY: That was an ethic thing. You didn’t do it. All I would do was say, “Uh-hunh,” “Un-uh,” or
“Uh-hunh.”
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TB: That’s what we did, too.
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PK: The men didn’t just discuss politics, but in the men’s shop, did you feel, when you were
listening in, that the barber, Chubby or people who worked with him, did the same thing? When
the discussion got to local politics or other issues like that—?
TB: Or about somebody else?
PK: You mentioned that those were more lively discussions.
PY: It was more of a lively discussion over there. The only thing, again, I think you would
find—I know Chubby did; I don’t know about Fred and the rest of the barbers—that that was a
practice of his, too, to not get into a lively discussion about certain things because they would
have some customers there that was really die-hards on their conversations and they liked to
argue about them.
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TB: Oh, yes.
PY: They’d like for somebody to disagree with them so they could keep it going.
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PK: There’s another subject I wanted to talk about which I haven’t talked about much yet and
that is the hairdressing and the hairstyles. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the kind of
hairstyles and the kind of hair treatments that were popular when you first got into the business.
Do you remember the names of them, the fashions?
TB: The page boy, I think, was the biggest fashion. What other?
PY: The marcel, the one that I was telling you about.
TB: Crokino, marcel . . . marcel was the first one.
PY: Only one time did I do that. I think I had an iron or used one of my operator’s irons to do
that. They were showing me how to do it. When I came into it, that was kind of going out, that
marcel.
TB: The marcel was a thing when I was in it, when I first started.
PK: Can you describe what it was? I know the name but I don’t actually know what it looked
like.
TB: It’s kind of hard to tell without the iron. It had a long iron, maybe as big around as my
finger. You’d take the hair and your comb. You’d twist the hair around the comb and then
twisted the iron around the hair, then slide it down, twisted it the other way. That made a wave.
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PY: Yes. Now, the kind that I’m thinking about is the iron that had the three—you pushed it
right into your hair and it mashed down. Didn’t they call that a marcel iron? You’d stick it in the
stove and heat it up and it had three, like, grooves in it like a wave. Then, the top part that you
clamped down on it had three prongs that went down.
TB: We didn’t use anything like that.
PY: Okay.
PK: I’ve got a couple of photos here. These are some older photos. People, especially the
women in these photos—would you say that that’s a marcel, those kind of waves in their hair?
PY: I’d say this is, yes.
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PK: That was.
TB: This is more of it.
PY: This one here—with her, that’s kind of a wave there, isn’t it?
TB: Yes, that’s the marcel.
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PY: Those are some old photos.
TB: Oh, yes, these are old ones.
PK: Yes, from like the 1920s and 1930s. Here’s one.
PY: Oh, yes. I don’t know what you’d call that. That’s just kind of a really tight curl, isn’t it?
TB: That looks more like a Crokino.
PY: Yes.
TB: We used to do the Crokino and then set it in a marcel wave.
PY: Right.
TB: When I went to Akron—
PY: That’s really a good marcel, even on him. That’s a good one there.
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TB: Then they finger waved a lot when I first started. . . marcel and finger wave.
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PK: This is a little different style. I don’t know if the hair is shorter. This one here.
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PY: That looks more like what they call a bob, isn’t it? A bob was kind of cut straight across,
wasn’t it?
TB: She’s got a bob across her forehead. This looks like it was a . . . what did I call it awhile
ago?
PY: Crokino?
TB: No.
PY: Not a marcel?
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TB: French…
PY: What was a French curl? I think I’ve heard the name but I don’t know what that was though.
TB: A Frenchman invented the marcel.
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PY: Yes, so maybe that’s what they called it then.
TB: You’d take the iron. . . If this was the iron .
PY: Right and you’d go around it.
TB: Go around.
PY: And circle it all the way down the iron.
TB: Yes, so far. Then, you took the iron out and went down this way to circle it the other way.
That way, the marcel was like this—
PY: I see. I never did that one.
TB: . . . like a finger wave.
PY: Right. Yes, I never did that.
PK: Mrs. Young, you mentioned that those marcels were going out when you first—
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PY: Yes, when I came into the business, they were just going out. Finger waves were still in
because we did do a lot of finger waves, but not the marcel iron too much.
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TB: We marceled and finger waved.
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PY: The finger wave is a little bit wider. The marcel is a little closer and tighter curled but the
fmger wave, you put in and it’s a little bit wider.
PK: Those irons—you didn’t use those hot irons or those rods, the curling iron—you didn’t use
those for finger waves?
TB: For the finger wave, you don’t use no iron.
PY: The hair’s got to be wet and flat. If you pressed the hair and curled it, then you combed it
out in finger waves. Those clips that she had, then you clipped those right into the waves to make
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them stay while you’re working at the others. I’ll tell you an iron also before I came into the
business, Somebody had one; I don’t remember who it was. The pressing iron was round.
Oh, like a ball and a cup. They called those pullers.
PY: Pullers. That’s what it was, the pullers, yes. My aunt . . . I wished I had that. My aunt had
one.
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TB: Madame Walker had a comb and the pullers was put out by. . . what was their name?
PY: You’ve heard of Madame Walker, haven’t you?
PK: Yes, I’ve heard the name.
PY: She was a famous—
TB: She was the first colored hairdresser.
PK: Was she from Chicago . . . the first millionaire?
TB: Yes.
PY: That’s right.
PK: I’ve heard of her.
TB: She had a comb, a big comb. I never could use her comb. I liked the smaller combs like I
had.
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PK: What did you use that for?
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TB: To press the hair . . . a pressing comb.
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PY: It makes it straight.
PK: Then, you would do the hairstyle after you’d use it?
TB: Yes.
PY: We was talking about the hair puller, the press puller. That comb came in after that. With
the puller, you got the hair by the roots and you pulled it out. With this type of pressing comb,
you’d put it in and you’d kind of turn it so it will get near the roots of the hair. It gets closer to
the scalp. The one that we were talking about, the big one, was a big toothed comb and it had a
big curve in it.
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TB: I’ve got one at home now, I think. I think it’s someplace in the attic. . . that Walker comb.
PY: Okay. That would really be a—
TB: I can’t think of the woman who invented the pullers.
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PK: That Walker comb would be great. It would connect to Madame Walker.
PY: Do you think you could find it?
TB: I’ll go up in the attic and look.
PY: That would be a beautiful display because that is one of the older combs.
TB: That was the first one.
PK: That was the marcel comb?
TB: No, that was just a pressing comb.
PK: I see. Of course, in the 1960s, naturals became more popular. Did hairdressers work on
naturals, or did barbers do that more, or women just didn’t come to the shop for that?
PY: I think that when what you call naturals, Afros, came in, it put a lot of people out of
business because everybody was wearing the “Fros” and they weren’t coming to the shop.
TB: They weren’t pressing it or anything like that.
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PY: No. I think we were all glad when that went out. [Laughter]
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TB: [Laughter]
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PK: I was looking at some photos of the Satin Doll and I noticed that there were some men
there, too, getting their hair done.
PY: Oh, yes.
PK: Were there always some men that would come in for this treatment or did that pick up at a
certain time?
TB: I think that came in in later years.
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PY: Much later. I’d say that started in about the 1980s.
TB: I imagine so—early 1980s.
PY: When the men started getting these jheri curls—is that what they called it? They would
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burning their hair out . . . I forget. It wasn’t curls. It was the straightener.
TB: Yes. There was a straightener that men used.
PK: That was going on also back in the 1920s and 1930s, too?
TB: I think that was the first one. . . the conk.
PY: The conk was the first one.
PK: Was the conk something that you put on your hair or was it a hairstyle? Was there a conk
haircut?
TB: That’s what they put on their hair.
PK: That was just the item you put on?
TB: Yes, that straightened the hair. That was mostly men.
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PY: Right. That’s when the men started changing.
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PK: So women didn’t use conk?
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PY: No.
TB: My uncle got one when I was a teenager. The first one, the barbershop did it. It was nice.
The next time, he conked himself. Putting it on, his hair turned red and come out. [Laughter]
PY: My brother-in-law in Chicago put one on and he woke up the next morning and all his hair
was laying on the pillow.
TB: [Laughter]
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PY: It burned him bad, really bad.
TB: It must have been full of lye back then.
PY: Yes. Then, I’d say in the 1980s—like she was saying—maybe the early 1980s, the men
started coming in to get the hair straighteners, the relaxers.
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TB: Yes.
PY: That’s why they started coming to the beauty shops.
PK: Basically, barbershops weren’t doing that then?
PY: No, not really.
PK: Men would come to beauty shops also just for the jheri curls or whatever?
PY: Yes, they was all in about the same time, don’t you think . . . the jheri curls and the relaxers?
TB: They all came in about the same time. Jheri curls came in a little later.
PY: First, wasn’t it?
TB: Was that first?
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PY: Oh, after.. . some of the people that would come in that had the relaxers wanted the jheri
curl but we couldn’t give it to them because they’d have to let their hair grow out some;
otherwise, they would have breakage in their hair. Then, there was some that came in that never
had anything and they got the jheri curls. I think that kind of went over big because they didn’t
have to keep coming to the shop all the time.
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TB: What was it that they put in their hair? What kind of a curl was it? I think it’s one of these
last ones they put in that had— They put something on it. The hair looked like it was wet all the
time.
PK: Activator, a conditioner?
TB: It was some kind of a perm.
PY: Some of those perms would turn some people’s hair red, don’t you think? The hair just
turned red. When I get a relaxer, mine turns yellow. My white goes yellow.
TB: Yes, the white hair.
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PY: They have to put a rinse on it.
TB: A white rinse or a blue rinse.
PY: Yes, to bring out that yellow. Some of those perms, relaxers, and the jheri curls would turn
the hair red, kind of red.
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TB: Yes, I guess it would.
PK: These ladies’ styles, the braids, the extensions, and things like that? Is that something that
you did?
TB: I never did learn that. That came in after I was on my way out.
PY: No, I never did those. I was still in the shop doing hair when they came in, but I didn’t do
them.
TB: I didn’t either.
PY: I had a couple of the operators that did them. Then, for awhile, the weaves.
TB: Yes, where they added onto your own hair.
PY: The hair weaves came in. They did quite a bit of that.
TB: I never did learn how to do that. Like I say, when it was getting in the money, I was going
out. [Laughter]
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TB: Yes.
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PY: Right. Now, with the braids. . . the only braiding I’ve ever done was to my own hair when
my hair was long.
PK: We talked a little bit about the hairstyles early on, the marcel and the bobs. Beside the
Afros, do you remember also the hairstyles that were popular in the 1960s, after the 1950s and
1960s, after the marcel?
TB: There was one I was just trying to think of—I called the name once—where you turn it up at
the ends.
PY: You’re talking about the page boy.
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TB: The page boy was popular.
PY: Yes. When I stopped braiding my hair, my hair was long and I wanted it down. Dorothy
Scott—I don’t know if you remember her—was a beautician out of Chicago.
TB: No, I didn’t know her.
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PY: I used to go to her. Nobody wanted to do my hair. I would go to the beauty shops and they
didn’t want to do it because I had so much hair. It was thick and long.
TB: I had that trouble, too.
PY: But, Dorothy would put a page boy in it so I would wear a page boy.
TB: They were popular.
PY: Yes.
PK: Would that be a version of the page boy. . . that portrait of you?
PY: No.
PY: That’s just a short hair cut. The page boy, if it’s long or even down to here.
TB: Yes, nice shoulder length made a nice page.
PY: . . . just kind of turned under like that is but it would just be thicker.
at
TB: I had a customer, when I first went to Toledo, whose hair was about like that.
G
PY: It was shorter?
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TB: Yes. That’s when page boys were popular.
PY: What is that?
SY: That's the way she used to wear it? [Laughter]
PY: That’s the picture I sent my husband before we got married.
PK: That’s a nice picture.
PY: That’s his graduation picture. My hair was even longer than that but I had it tucked under
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with pins. It was down the middle of my back.
PK: Wow, that’s nice.
TB: Let’s
see. You had some hair.
PY: Yes, I did.
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TB: This is Chubby?
PY: Yes. That was his graduation picture. That was in 1935 and we married in 1936.
TB: You made a good looking couple.
PY: We wrote to each other a whole year before we saw each other. Just seeing this. I sent him
my picture. He sent my aunt—it was his aunt; his aunt raised me—and he sent her the graduation
picture and then he wanted to know what I looked like so I sent him this.
TB: And from that. . . [Laughter]
PY: Right, we started writing.
TB: Yes.
PY: The first time he came down to see me, he asked me to marry him. That’s not supposed to
be on this.
PK: That’s okay. That’s in the story.
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PY: You can take it out. That’s not supposed.
ur
PK: We’re not interviewing for that so it’s not going to turn up in the exhibit.
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PY: All right.
TB: When page boys first came in, I had a customer whose hair was like this and she just had to
have a page boy so I said, “To make a nice page boy, your hair needs to be a little longer.” But, I
just had to give it to her anyway, so I turned those ends up and kind of fixed it as near a page boy
as I could. Later on, she started doing hair. She went to school. After she got her license, and got
in a shop, and started work, she said, “Thelma, do you remember when I used to come in your
shop with hair this long and want one of those long page boys?” I said, “Yes, I remember.” She
said, “They’re coming in and doing that to me now.” [Laughter]
PY: I was trying to think of the style that, also, the women used to use where their hair was
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turned straight but turned up, just kind of feathered up.
TB: A feather curl, I think they called that.
PY: Yes, just feathered up.
PY: Right.
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TB: Yes, and then kind of loose.
TB: Yes, that was the feather curl.
PY: I’d wear mine that way sometimes, too. It’s too bad that maybe over the years that we didn’t
save some of them old styles but you just weren’t thinking.
TB: You don’t think ahead.
PY: Yes, you don’t think about it.
PK: Did you have style books that would show the various hairstyles?
TB: Yes, some we did and some we didn’t.
at
PY: Right. They’d want it done like that; but, sometimes they didn’t have enough hair to do all
that. I had one customer—this was that little Jewish lady that I had—who liked French rolls. Her
hair was real thin. She loved these big French rolls. I thought about that when you were talking
about that little short hair. She said, “I want my hair to look like that.” I would tell her, “I can put
your hair in a French roll, but it’s not going to look like that picture because you don’t have
enough hair.”
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“I want it anyway.”
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I would back comb that lady’s hair to death trying to get it packed down enough to give her that
French roll. She was always satisfied with it. She was always happy.
TB: [Laughter]
PY: They’d look at pictures and they’d want their hair like the picture but you might not be
able—
PK: Was that a problem . . . people wanting something that didn’t match . . .
TB: Maybe for just a one-night affair, they’d want something as near that as possible, but some
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of those styles, you couldn’t comb yourself.
PY: No, no. When you said one-night affair, that reminded me. Then, the hairpieces came in.
TB: Yes.
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PY: People would want these different styles. They could bring you a hair piece and you could
put it into their hair. That gave them more hair, more body. Like even with the lady with the
French curl, if she’d have brought me some hair that matched hers, she would have had a bigger,
fatter French curl because then it would have blended in.
PK: This wasn’t a weave. This is just a wig, basically?
PY: Just a wig like, yes.
PK: Was that popular for a period? Are wigs still popular or did that kind of go out?
TB: They’re still popular.
PY: I would say it’s still popular, yes. You see all this hair on some of these people’s heads, it’s
a hairpiece in there or a weave.
TB: Yes, some of these weaves, you don’t know whether it’s a wig or their real hair. They make
them so real now.
PY: That’s right.
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PK: There’s something that you just mentioned that sometimes people get something done just
for a big event. Did you notice if there were certain kinds of events that people normally got their
hair done for?
ur
TB: If you’re going to a formal.
O
PY: Or New Year’s Eve.
TB: Or a party or something and you want your hair fixed a certain way. But, the next day, you
wouldn’t be able to comb it that way yourself.
PK: There were certain hairstyles that were only good for a night out? You couldn’t wear it that
way for a week or something?
TB: No.
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PY: They wouldn’t be able to handle it. We could put it in and it would look beautiful.
TB: For right then, for that day or that night.
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PY: That’s predominantly when we used a lot of spray on it to make sure that it stayed in place. I
remember on New Year’s Eve, we were always busy at the shop and stayed late because
everybody was getting ready going to parties. They wanted these fancy hairdos because they
were going to different things or, like she said, a formal affair.
PK: So I guess, the everyday hairstyles that people could wear for awhile . . . were those the
things like the marcels and the page boys?
TB: Yes, something that you can take care of yourself.
PK: Do you remember the names of those fancier ones? Did they have names?
TB: Yes, they had names. I don’t know if I remember what they were though.
PY: One is called a bouffant. Remember when the bouffants were in?
TB: Yes.
PY: You’d back comb the hair up and it looked like. .. You’ve probably seen pictures on the
Dick Clark Show with the great big hairdos?
PK: The really big hair . . . yes, I’ve seen those.
at
PY: They call those bouffants and they were in for awhile. I’d say those were in in, like, the
Dick Clark days. I don’t know when that was. Was it the l960s? I would say the 1960s.
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TB: Yes. I know my sister and I used to fix our hair with a.. . I was looking at a picture the other
day when I was looking in my little snapshot book. Somehow—do you remember—if you had
enough hair, you’d make a big roll over your ear and then some of this hair came back over it.
I don’t remember now how we did it. This was up someway.
PY: Up high. . . we back combed that, yes.
TB: Yes, back on the side and then had this over your ear.
PY: I don’t know what they called it.
TB: I don’t either.
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PY: The hair was a little high here. It kind of went back straight and then this part was out and
bouffanted out over the ear.
TB: Yes.
TB: Yes.
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PY: Actually, some of those may not have had names to them but we just did styles. We’d just
create our own styles. I loved to do that. That’s why I had some customers that said they liked
me because they liked their hairstyle changed. Whatever I felt like I would want to do, they
would let me do. So, that made us creative.
PY: She would probably decide. If her customer said, “Oh, do what you want to do,” in her own
mind what she wants to do.
TB: Yes, something that maybe fits the face more so than the way it had been.
PY: Yes.
PK: That was a talent you learned over time just to match . . .
PY: If you were a creative person, you liked to do these things. As I was telling you, when we
would have a style show every so often—you remember?—
TB: Yes.
at
PY: .. . you would do creative things to the different hair. My son loved to do that. He loved to
do all kinds of creative styles. I wasn’t so much into it as he was.
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TB: In Toledo, every year, we had a style show and all the hairdressers got together. That was a
big affair.
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PY: Oh, yes . . . loved it. My son worked in Michigan. He left here and went and lived in
Detroit, Michigan, for about a year. He was not a good press and curler, but in the shop that he
was in—I guess it was a big shop—he learned quite a bit. . . how to do the curling irons. They
did some fancy styles with those curling irons.
TB: Oh, yes.
PY: When he came back to our shop, he was doing a lot of that that he learned in Detroit. You
could be very creative with a pressing comb and a curling iron.
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TB: In Toledo, I had a customer whose hair was real thick. I used to marcel it all the time. She
was going to Kentucky on her vacation one year. She was a music teacher at one of the schools
there. She wanted me to do her hair someway so that it wouldn’t be so hard for her take care of.
So, I told her, “I know how to fix your hair and you won’t have to comb it for two or three days.”
I gave her some bangs up here, curly bangs, and I parted her hair, and I french-braided it up from
the back, and then I fixed a pin to the braids back here, across here. She always wore a hat all the
time. And this was when they weren’t wearing hats then. I said, “Now, Phyllis, don’t wear a
hat.” She said, “Oh, Thelma, how am I going to do without a hat?”
I said, “You take a hat and you put it in a bag, and carry it with you, and if you see a hat, you put
this on.” [Laughter]
PY: [Laughter]
TB: When she came back, I said, “Did you wear your hat?” She said, “I brought it back just the
way I took it.” She said that when she got there, she was going down the street and the mailman
finally caught up with her. I guess he was going around a corner. He said, “Lady, pardon me, but
I’ve been walking behind you for a whole block looking at your hair. It is beautiful.” She kept
that hair like that till she came back home. [Laughter]
PY: She probably was always covering her head up.
TB: She said she wasn’t a bad sleeper. She had more compliments on her hair. I said, “If
anybody wants to know what your hairstyle was, tell them it was French braids.”
PY: About when was this? Was this in the 1950s or the 1960s?
TB: Oh, that was in the 1970s.
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I kept my hair short all the time and I used to say, “I wonder my hair don’t grow,” but I was
cutting it every month. I cut from a half inch to maybe an inch and a half off. I had so much
trouble . . . I had more hair than anyone else in the shop. I just got mad one day and I said,
“Shoot! I’m going to do my own hair.” So, I cut this off on top and kept it curled and this here, I
started braiding. I French-braided it. When I started out, the ends of those braids would just meet.
I just could pin them together. About two years later, my hair was down to here.
PY: Yes.
TB: And it grew so that James kept saying, “When you going to cut your hair?”
PY: Chubby didn’t want me to cut my hair. When I wanted to cut my hair, he said, “I don’t want
you to cut your hair.” I’d say, “But, it’s so heavy.” I had such a thick head of hair. I said, “It’s so
hot and it’s so heavy.” So, finally, he said, “Oh, okay.” I remember we went to the barbershop,
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TB: [Laughter]
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his barber. He used to work for him years ago cleaning up the shop. He wasn’t in the hair
business then. He took me there and the barber said, “Man! You’re going to let your wife cut her
hair off? Don’t let her cut all this hair off.” He said, “She wants it cut.” I said, “This is my hair
on my head, and I want it cut, and if you’re not going to cut it, I’ll go someplace else.” I braided
the hair and then he just cut the braids. I had two braids about like that. I always kept it in two
braids. I’d taken the two braids, after we got the haircut, to this lady that did weaving and she
was going to weave them together and make me a hairpiece so that if I wanted to wear a braid
across, I could. I never could get the money to get the braids out. That was back there in the
1950s . . . well, 1940s, really and it was only four dollars, but I couldn’t afford four dollars.
PY: I couldn’t afford four dollars to get my braids out.
TB: When I started out, I was doing a shampoo and a marcel wave for three and a half.
PY: See what it would cost you nowadays.
TB: Oooh, you’d work a week for it. You worked a week then for it.
PY: I don’t know what else you would want to know.
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PK: I think I have plenty. This is helpful. Thank you for talking.
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