Lemonade-Can Curlers, Hot Rollers, and Other Hair Tips from MHS in the 1960s

Well, this is about 6 years BEFORE high school … but can you tell which sister had the “good” hair?

My Montclair High years were 1965 to 1969 — and probably like most “girls” at that point, my mornings began in mild despair at the mirror, trying to get my hair to look right.

For some reason, Girl Scouting started this obsession for me, in junior high. We had a magazine related to Scouting that included gorgeous photos of women who used Breck Shampoo; they had shoulder-length, smooth, gleaming hair, with just a hint of wave and a curl at the tips.* No matter how regularly I used the product, though, my hair remained overly curly and often frizzy.

My mother too seemed to despair over my hair. My little sister’s hair was like my mom’s — New England smooth and looked adorable in a “pixie cut.” But the shorter mine was, the more it curled … and the longer it was, the more it frizzed.

There were some things that supposedly would “fix” this. One was to set your hair on big rollers made from metal lemonade cans, the kind that held frozen juice concentrate. Alas, we never had more than one or two of those.

Another, my mother’s favorite, was to rub my hair with “Dixie Peach Pomade,” which I thought was like a stiff Vaseline, scented with peaches; it hurt a lot when my mother tried to scrub it onto my curls and tug them straight.