Introduction:  Before Beauty School

The woman was just getting the standard $2.75 set’n rinse, which would take no more than an hour.  Lord knows how many of them I’d given over the past twenty years. Not my big money maker mind you. Just a few dollars for an hour’s work. But, like they say, it all adds up.

However, it started me thinking about the first shampoo and rinse I gave a long time ago. That would be twenty years ago now, back in the spring of 1949. A lot of rinses and permanents have gone under the bridge since then -- and a lot of memories.  So many memories. They start to come back as I begin combing out the woman’s hair. She was one of my regulars. More of a friend actually than a customer. Most of my regulars were family by now. Cutting people’s hair for twenty years will do that.

Today was my last day in my beauty shop, and I couldn’t help but feel a sense of nostalgia. When I started working in the shop my kids were 13, 11, and 4 years old. They would come running in and out of the shop everyday on their way to school or on their way to play with their friends. Now, of course, they are all grown and have their own lives to live.

“Your hair always has so much body,” I tell the woman as I continue combing her out.  I had probably told her that a thousand times. 

“I brush every night, Dorothy,” she tells me. I, of course, knew that, too.

My mind drifts back over the years. Thousands of memories.   If you ever want to know what’s going on in a small town, let me offer a piece of advice. Just become a beauty operator. I don’t claim to understand why, but there is something about getting your locks trimmed that loosens lips. I’ve known women who were as private and quiet as church mice, but once the scissors start snipping, you couldn’t shut them up if you stuffed a sock in their mouth.

So many stories.  Some sad, some kinda funny, some downright hilarious.  And poignant ones too.

People have asked me when I tell them I was a beauty operator, “Just what do women talk about in the beauty shop”.   I just smile.  If they only knew, I think to myself. Then I started thinking. Maybe I should tell someone what goes on in there.  Why, it’s a shame to tell.  Isn’t it?

So, pour yourself a cup of coffee, sit back in a soft chair and let me tell you what those ladies really talk about under those driers.   In Dorothy’s Beauty Stop.

Is She Nuts?

Now you don’t have to tell me what they’re thinking.  “Is she nuts?”   The woman is leaving her three kiddies for an entire year to enroll in beauty school 250 miles away in Des Moines? Good grief, the littlest one is only a baby!  

I suppose those were valid arguments, but you see it’s like this; those kiddies and I had acquired a nasty little habit. We liked to eat.

Another argument went like this: every woman in the country is starting to use home permanents, and in a few years there won’t be a single beauty shop left. 

“And just where are you going to put your beauty shop?“ one lady asked.

“Well,” I replied almost apologically, “I do have this front room in my house, and …. .”

“A shop in your house?” she said.   Who would go to a beauty shop in someone’s house?“

It was downright mind boggling the encouragement I got.

“Have you thought about what you’re going to do with your kids when you’re in Des Moines?”  others asked.

But, alas, my brothers and sisters told me not to worry; they would care for my kids for the entire year.  Without going into the details of how I found myself in this predicament, the year was 1946 and I was a 32-year-old woman living in the town of Rolfe in Northwest Iowa with no husband, no special skills, no money, and three children, aged 12, 10, and 3. I had managed to keep our heads above water by doing part time jobs, such as piecework sewing, taking in washings and ironings, and making children’s clothing from old clothes. One year I made uniforms for the Rolfe High School cheerleaders. The school couldn’t afford new ones so I made them out of some old material the school had lying around. I thought the girls looked great in those cute uniforms.

In addition to my many odd jobs I was cooking the dinner meals and doing general housecleaning for a man in Rolfe who was permanently confined to a wheel chair. Over the course of a few months he started me thinking about my life and my future. It was he that put the “beauty operator bug” in my head. The idea began to germinate and grow until after a couple of years I decided to take the plunge.

So, in the spring of 1948 I said my goodbyes to my three children, and headed to Des Moines and the Iowa School of Cosmetology for a year of training. My oldest daughter, Barbara, was 13 years old and stayed with my brother, Russell Bohn, and his wife, Verna, in Curlew. My middle child, Jerry, was 11 and stayed with my sister Helen and her husband Bruce Rouse in Ayrshire. And my baby, Richard, was 3 years old and stayed with my mother and father in Curlew.

Continue to beauty school.