I think it was a confluence of factors that caused my mother to close Arlene’s Beauty Shop.

We kids were older now. Donna would turn ten in 1964 and I would turn fifteen, and so there was no longer any need for my mother to be at home during the day to watch over us, that being one of the reasons she had become a hairdresser to begin with.

And Sterling Drugs was opening a new plant in Myerstown to be called Winthrop right beside their Bayer Aspirin plant. Or was it Winthrop that was opening a Sterling plant? I always got those mixed up. We always called it Winthrop. The point is they’d be hiring a lot of new workers and that seemed like a good opportunity for a good job with regular hours. At the same time my mother’s longtime friend Lynn Klopp (Randy’s dad) and his family had decided to sell the Snack Bar after his father Skippy had died, and Lynn was going to get a job at Winthrop.

Around the same time the house next to Rufe Robinson on South Race Street became vacant and there was going to be a public sale. That house seemed ideal for a family of four.

And I think my mother was just plain tired of dealing with the public and the long and irregular hours.

So by early summer of 1964 my mother had closed up shop and sold all her equipment. My parents had bought the house next to Rufe Robinson (I think it went for $16,500 at the public sale, if memory serves). It was actually a house that Rufe Robinson had built years before along with the one that he was living in now. Rufe was by this time an elderly man, a widower, and didn’t get around very well any more. 

My parents sold the half-a-house on West Main Street, but I don’t know for how much and we moved to South Race. It was such a painless move, I don’t remember anything about the move itself. 

It may have even been late spring when we moved because my mother planted a garden. (Or perhaps she planted the garden the following spring, I can’t really be sure.) And the corn grew as high as an elephant’s eye.

She also grew some rhubarb and made rhubarb pie, the only time I’ve ever had that, as far as I can recall.

But that was the only year we had a garden because my mother was the only one who took care of it. So the following year she had my father plant grass. And he was the only one who mowed it.

My mother never completely gave up her beautician’s skills, though. She continued to do the hair for relatives and friends, whether it was a simple wash and set or a perm or even an occasional hair dye.

Once a beautician, always a beautician.