1930 The Windblown Bob

The Windblown Bob 1930

I don't know how I ever convinced them to let me have it! I’ve forgotten the arguments, but they must have been strong, or, perhaps my mother, feeling sorry for me, ran interference with my father to convince him that a “windblown bob”would not do any permanent damage to my faith and morals.

I was fourteen. I looked like Ella Cinders, the freckle nosed heroine of the Funny Papers, who had thick straight black hair, wispy at the side. She was usually in some kind of awkward dilemma. She was never a true heroine; they were always “fair”-haired and pretty.

So that was what I looked like, except that I also had a set of teeth that my mother referred to as protruding, but my brothers called them by their true name. I was tall, too, and inclined to complain. "Keep your shoulders back, Katherine, don't be ashamed. Stand tall," my father admonished. How could I stand anything else, I used to think bitterly, when I'm several inches taller than every other girl in the class, and, what was utter tragedy, at fourteen, taller than most of the boys.

Gynsmer Whittaker, Mac Ault and I were the big ones at the back of the class. I suppose we were backwards', but also because we intimidated the teachers. We three were taller than all the teachers but one. He taught ancient history and it was my favorite subject because I could stand beside him and look him in the eye rather than at the top of his head.

I was head and shoulders above everyone, including my mother, my father, and my three brothers. My father often referred to me as the 'throw back', and I trusted that he meant I had inherited the genes of a long ago ancestor, rather than that I should have been thrown back-- the giant of the litter. 

So I was tall, with straight black hair, and I didn't much like myself. Somehow I had convinced my mother to let me go modern, “a word that terrified her”.

My older brother had many girlfriends who were modern. They wore high heels and their very short satin skirts had swinging fringes on them. They had boyish bobs', Horrors! 

They drank gin, too, because my father had caught them at it once. They were in the back room of the local ice cream parlor drinking out of a 'loving cup' my brother had just won as champion of the Blessed Sacrament Young Peoples tennis club. Reverend Father O'Gorman didn't know about that. 

Anyway, that Saturday my father had business in Prescott, and Mother Frank, Mary and I went along for the ride in our old open Dodge touring car. My father drove and no one spoke. Frank, Mary and I sat in the back seat, Mary between Frank and me.

Every once in a while Frank slithered his hand behind Mary and pinched me. He was furious because he had to come. His plans that Saturday had been to go with Joe Bourette to snare rabbits, but when Father journeyed we all had to go.

It was a family thing. I didn't dare even so much as a small ouch when pinched because Dad was a nervous driver who required utter silence in the car. So we went to Prescott for my 'Wind Blown Bob”.

The Beauty Parlor was situated over a store, and up a long, narrow stairway. I do not remember the actual cutting but I remember what I looked like in the mirror. My thick straight cap of hair had been shaped, and there were Kiss Curls curved against my cheeks. It was beautiful!

I had been transformed into a fourteen year old, oversized, Betty Boop. My mother waited for me at the foot of the steep stairs. Her reaction was totally unexpected. She was utterly dismayed. “OH, Sacred Heart, what will your father say!”

She spit on her hands, and with flattened palms pasted my “Kiss Curls” back off my cheeks and behind my ears. No matter! I could spit on the curls, too, and bring them back when my parents weren't around. I had my “Windblown Bob”. 

It was a rite of passage and I felt almost fifteen….