The Story of Maxine, To Whom I Owe Everything
Her name was Maxine and she was born in Fredonia, Ohio in August 1914. She was Elizabeth Maxine, to be accurate, but she never used her first name. She was the middle child, between an older brother and a younger sister. Her mother, a hairdresser and her father, an alcoholic, divorced when Maxine was young. In 8th grade, she dropped out of school to help her mother full time in her beauty shop, as did her younger sister. They eventually moved to West Virginia. She spent her teen years working to help support the family, in the days when no formal training was required in order to cut hair or give a permanent wave (that’s a perm, in modernspeak). She said her own hair started to turn white when she was 16 and was fully white before she was 25.
Maxine — my grandmother — never drank. She said she tasted alcohol once in her life, and that was enough for her. She smoked as a teenager, but, in her words “I quit when they went up to ten cents a pack. So when my sister was spending all her money on cigarettes, I could buy underwear and things like that.” She was very pragmatic.
She and her mother opened their own shop in town and were very successful, as far as small town beauty shops went. They made it through the Great Depression without too much struggle because, Grandma said, “the women wouldn’t give up getting their hair done.” Apparently, a…
