Smelly Perms and Buster Brown Haircuts
Still to this day, the word 'Perm' makes me shudder even though perms have come a long way! Besides modern day perms being less harmful to the hair and more flattering to the person getting one, the biggest improvement to perms is that smell-the gagging, obnoxious smell that filled your senses for days is gone. And the end result is complimentary. When I was growing up my mother never took me to a 'beauty salon' to get my haircut. Rather, she took me to a barber shop in our downtown. I vaguely remember walking up big stone steps and into a large area with three or maybe four barbers dressed in crisp, white shirts-more like uniforms with black pants. They each had their own area in front of a big mirror. They each had a chair that, to a little kid, was huge-complete with a leather strap attached to the side used to sharpen their razor blade before shaving a customer in either hot lather or straight razor style. After my mother got her hair cut, my brother and I took tur...