The Chances We Took

I went to beauty school when I was thirty-eight to become a beautician, so I got out and bought my own beauty shop.  It was between the ice cream store and the hardware store, with only a fire wall to separate the two.  This was in the 60's and 70's.

A beautician is like a psychiatrist.  People go in to have their hair worked on and sit there and unload.  They have so much to say.   I had warned those girls,  "When you're workin' on a customer,  you don't know who you're talkin' to.   Judy, I want you to put a halter on your tongue." 
One day,  one of my beauticians was working on a customer.  Judy was working on another lady.  The one was talking about the other lady's husband running around with her and the other one got up and hit the other with a hair brush.  Judy ended up pulling one customer's hair trying to get her off of the other customer.   I had to call the police to separate them.    The police came and they were laughin' so hard, they didn't want to separate them.   I said, "They're going to kill each other, you idiots!" 

If I told you everything that happened at that beauty shop...

Another day, I was reading the morning journal and drinking my coffee at 9am and I thought, "What was that noise i heard?  That sounded like Miss. L."  I went to my door and running out of her door, I saw this black man in a plaid shirt.  I called the police real quick.  He had gone into the ice cream store and when the kids were lined up to get their ice cream cones, he hit Mrs. L, blackened her eye and beat her.  That was the noise I heard.  It was muffled.  The police caught him as he went over the bridge.  Miss L. did not like the blacks.   This one colored guy was standing in line and she wouldn't take his brother's order and ignored him to take someone else's order.   That's why the guy jumped over the counter and hit her.  That was back when they had just started block busting.  The blacks had just started going into stores.

One day, my husband had to go to Pennsylvania to visit his sister, so when I went in, I had to open without him.  Usually he stayed with me until I opened.  I heard someone out walkin' on the roof of the hardware store next door.  Then I heard, "Open up! FBI! Open up!"  The man had stolen equipment from Chicago and the FBI had come to get him. 

I decided to sell my beauty shop before I got murdered or something happened.  That, and the furnace was getting ready to blow up.  The fire chief had red tagged it.

Then, I went to the hospital to be a nurses aid.  Dr. W. was a patient and was in the hospital on my floor on my end of the hall, so I had to give him his bed bath.  He was driving Smitty, the head nurse crazy.   Every time a nurse would go in to check on him, he would throw his covers off, stark naked, on purpose.  He was nuts.  She told me he thought he had syphilis.  I told her to tell him off, but she said, "Oh my gosh, I can't do that!"  The nurses would trick me into doing what they weren't allowed to do.   When I walked in his room and the covers went off, I said, "Listen you! I told you not to do that!"  He looked at me and said, "There's nothing you can do about it. They won't believe you."  We all got sick of it and they weren't allowed to chastise him, so we had to put up with it.  Smitty said, "You don't have to put up with it because you're a nurse's aid."  I said, "Well what do you want me to do, kill him?!"  I put a belly band (when a woman had a baby in those days, they put it on to hold the uterus in) on him and attached it with a safety pin and hid it so he couldn't get it off!  Well, he never did it again!

In 1965, I didn't know how to drive a car.  My husband was trying to teach me how to drive a Model T Ford.  You had to get out and crank it with that thing.  He taught me how to drive in the middle of a cornfield and I almost ran into a tree stump. 

When I look back at the chances we took, innocently, and my life experiences, it's unbelievable!