Flow It, Show It, Long as I Can Grow It. . .

My friend Flutterby posted, not too long ago, about the history of her hair, which got me to thinking that there was probably a story or two for me to tell, along similar lines. . .

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I grew up in the 60s (which really lasted into the early 70s, but that's a different topic for a different time). My senior year of high school and freshman year of college, I, uh, grew my hair long.

Before that, my dad and my coaches generally conspired together to keep said growth in abeyance.  It is difficult to describe to folks who weren't there for the fun, but the years of my adolescence were marked by seemingly endless conflict between young men and their fathers over the length of their hair (the sons' hair, not the fathers').  It almost seems comical now, but even the 1964-vintage Beatles haircuts could inspire men of my dad's generation to something close to apoplexy (and hey, how could I pass up an opportunity to embed a Beatles photo in my blog?).

Dad used to grumble, when he saw a 'long-haired' young man on the street, "You can't even tell he's not a girl, if you see him from behind."  If I pointed out that his butt was not nearly wide or round enough to be a girl's, Dad would get on my case for looking at girls' butts too closely.  It was seriously no-win.

My senior year, though, Dad took a new job in a city 500 miles away, and during the six months or so before the family moved to join him in the new city, he only saw me on weekends, during which he was pretty much sleep-deprived, and had other things to deal with than keeping track of the length of my hair.  And Mom was a bit mellower about it.  Through a rather convoluted set of circumstances, I also didn't play football that fall, so my football coaches also  lost such traction as they'd ever had on my fashion sense as pertaining to the length of my hair.  And, to be perfectly, brutally candid, if they all hadn't made such a fuss about the length of my hair, I quite probably wouldn't have felt the appeal of growing it long ('cuz, yeah, I'm just that kind of contrary, when I put my mind to it, although I was generally quite compliant toward the authorities in my life; but when that authority was no longer in force, well, then, woo-hoo!).  I promised myself that I would never fight with my kids over their hair the way my dad had fought with me (*sigh*; mohawks and piercings hadn't occurred to anyone yet. . .)

In the fullness of time, at its longest, my hair eventually reached almost to my shoulders, thick and wavy, and parted down the middle. Once, one of the ladies at church grabbed me and asked, "Who does your hair?"  When I told her that it just grew that way, and all I did to it was wash it, she made a sour face, and muttered, "I would KILL for hair like that, and you just get it for free. . ."  Well, didn't I just feel so blessed. . .

At its longest, I could just pull it together into a pony-tail.  Which, in the long, hot summer of '73, working as I did at a manual-labor-type job, was something of a practical necessity.  Sometime during the fall term at college, I got a girl I knew to cut it back to something more like jaw-length.  Between how hot it was, and how long it took to dry after I washed it (to say nothing of shampoo expenses; those 59-cent bottles of cheap shampoo could really add up), I decided to scale back on the sheer bulk of my hair, to something just a tad more manageable (at least by mid-70s standards; it was still long enough to keep my ears warm in the winter, without having to resort to a hat).   By the time I finished college, I had returned to parting my hair on the side, and even though it was still fairly long and thick by today's standards (the 70s were famously renowned for 'helmet-hair'), I was a much more conventional-looking young man by then (here is a photo from our wedding, in the summer of 1980).  And it wasn't many years after that, before I became engaged in a stubborn (and, alas, probably ultimately futile) holding-action against follicular attrition.

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When 1F was somewhere around 6 or so (thus dating the event to the late 80s, when I'd have been in my early 30s), she was poking around in my desk one day, and found my old freshman ID card from college (reproduced here for your edification and enjoyment; the photo was taken roughly 3-4 months before max-length).

She checked it out for a minute, and couldn't quite wrap her young mind around what it seemed to be saying, that this was, by golly, a photo of her dear ol' dad.  She brought it to me, asking, "Is this a picture of you, Dad?"  When I confirmed that I had, in fact, looked like that in an earlier lifetime, she fell on the floor laughing, and said, "You look like a mommy!"

"Yeah," I answered, sighing, "that's what my dad said, too. . ."