REFLECTIONS OF GROWING UP IN THE HAIR BUSINESS

Ken's tools of the trade.

My father Ken Wright was both a barber and a hairdresser. He apprenticed with a Dresden, ON barber by the name of Fay Craig in 1917 and moved on to Detroit, Mi where he barbered at the Detroiter Hotel and later the J. L. Hudson Company department store where my mother Grace just happened to work in the hosiery section. The Wrights moved back to Chatham, ON in 1936 where they opened a downtown Beauty Salon. My folks eventually sold the business and moved back to the Wright homestead in Dresden shortly after I was born, and Ken resumed barbering in the town from whence he came.

I

KEN WRIGHT

have always taken more than a passing interest in hair, due primarily I guess, to the fact that my father Ken was a lifetime barber and hairstylist. He operated Wrights Beauty Salon on King Street West in Chatham, ON for a 10-year period, and commuted daily from our home in nearby Dresden. For much of that time it was a matter of routine that my mother Grace and I would travel to work with him on Saturdays.

While my mother did her weekly grocery shopping at the Loblaws store just below my dad's shop and attended to other matters, I was left to put in time looking at magazines, sorting out brushes, combs, clips, curlers and sweeping up hair from the floor around four hair-dressing stations. My day was broken up with a highlight visit to the Blue Bird Restaurant for lunch where I developed an addiction for liver and bacon.

With an average of a half dozen customers at any given time on a busy Saturday, the beauty shop was a beehive of activity as four attendants, in addition to my dad, hustled from chair to chair and hairdryer to hairdryer. The hum of constant chitchat and the smell of hairdressing chemicals linger with me to this day.

It'll only be another 50 minutes girls!

My dad developed a number of permanent styles and specialized in hair cutting and finger waves. He was especially known for his neat and tapered neckline cuts at a time when shorter hair was becoming popular. He also introduced manicuring, marcelling, scalp treatment and tinting to the fair ladies of Chatham.

The "permanent" was big business in the late 30's and early 40's and its importance can be gauged if one considers that the majority of middle-class women, at a rough estimate, had their hair set once a week and permed perhaps once every three months as new hair replaced the waved hair. Meanwhile, hairdressers sought to improve the process and reduce the work involved; this meant savings at the lower end of the market and yet more women getting their hair permed. This was also stimulated by pictures of the rich and famous, particularly film stars, who all had their hair permed.

It was kind of a glamorous era, no question.

I seemed to pick up a lot about the business through the process of osmosis during those formative years. But heaven help me if I ever entertained thoughts of going into the field myself...Both my parents would have killed me! LOL

A finger wave was a method of setting hair into waves (curls) that was popular in the 1920s and 1930s and again in the late 1990s in North America and Europe. Silver screen actresses such as Bette Davis and Anita Page are credited with the original popularity of finger waves. In their return in the 1990s, the style was popularized by pop stars like Madonna, and Hip Hop stars of the time, such as Missy Elliott. The popularity of finger waves in the 1990s was aided by a movement toward shorter, more natural hair in the African-American community.

A complimentary cardboard fan
given to all Wrights Beauty Salon
customers having to sit under the
heat of hairdryers.

The process involved pinching the hair between the fingers and combing the hair in alternating directions to make an "S" shape wave. A waving lotion was applied to the hair to help it retain its shape. The lotion was traditionally made using karaya gum, but more modern styles often use liquid styling gels or hairspray. Over the years, the use of clips (and later tape) also became popular to hold the heavy damp waves until the gel dried.

The Chatham business was severely impacted toward the end of WW2 with the introduction of the Toni Home Permanent that offered women an inexpensive alternative to the cost of professional hairdressing. For Ken, the writing was soon on the wall and he sold the business to private interests in 1945.

He then resumed cutting men's hair back in Dresden by joining an old friend by the name of Jim Ford who also operated a billiard hall in conjunction with his establishment (combined barbershops and pool rooms were not uncommon in those days). 

Still, it was not unusual to see a woman, draped with a towel in my dad's barber chair while having a trademark neck trim, or several town "toughs" sitting with curlers in their hair and unperturbed by curious onlookers, courtesy of a finger wave that had suddenly become popular with fashion-conscious young males -- perhaps due to Ken Wright's persuasion. Uni-sex hairstyling in the early stages, you say?

My dad always claimed that he "cut my hair curly", although I too was subjected to more than one of his finger wave and booster tonic sets -- always in the back kitchen of our home.

Ken had to give up barbering in 1951 as a result of a heart condition. He died a year later in his 53rd year. 

At 14-years-of-age, I got my hair cut for the first time outside of my home by the aforementioned Jim Ford who could not stop crying, start to finish...Poor Jim, it was the worst haircut I ever had! He charged me full price though...Again, the first time I ever paid for a haircut.

I never went back to that shop. Nothing about haircuts was ever the same!

A NOTE BY MY MOTHER APPEARING IN "OUR BABY BOOK".

I can truly say that my life has been a hair-raising experience!