The Town Crier: Hair today, gone tomorrow

Published 8:15 am Wednesday, May 28, 2025

The newspaper just printed the senior pictures of all the kids graduating from the area hi skools. I’m really glad that that’s a tradition in our hometown. If we were New York or Tokyo I could see how that might lead to a paper shortage, but for a small town like ours, it’s a treat the community shares in. I make it a point to look over each of the kids every year and ruminate about what the future might hold for them and what wonders they’ll live to see in their lifetime. There’s a good chance that some of them will make it to the year 2100. Somebody will probably make a hit song titled “Party Like Its 2099” they’ll dance to as oldsters. I graduated from DHS in 1978 and then there were no laptop computers, no internet and the only smart phone was on Dick Tracy’s wrist. Artificial intelligence was a fanciful science fiction movie plot line that seemed like it might be a good thing … or not.

Photography hit the scene in the 1840’s and it wasn’t long before class photos were being made. Eventually the class photos added senior photos to the record of school days, and from that first class photo back in the mid-1800’s to the senior pics in the paper that just came out, one thing has always caught the eye of the beholder; the hairstyles! There’s fashion and there’s fad and heaven help the kids that opt for that years’ fad style rather than a classic hairdo. I should know, the fad in the late 70’s was to have hair like a rock star. That look is what I pursued, but let me tell you, my hair did not co-operate. I had thick red hair that was bushy to say the least. My less than complimentary friends even brought up Brillo pads for comparison. The goal was to have long hair hanging down in the back. My hair went out. In retrospect, I’m not sure there was any haircut that would have worked for my senior picture, but certainly what I did try was not the right approach.

Back then the hair styles were pretty limited. There wasn’t a constant barrage of social media pics, or endless music videos from a variety of sources to give us ever changing ideas. Movies and TV shows would influence us bit by bit. The Olympics might come along and one of the ice skaters would have a cool short do and a percentage of the girls would go for that. Others would keep their hair longer like some of the leftover hippie-chicks, and then another group would have something mid-range with a little wave to it. That was about it. We tended to look and dress alike. Jeans, tennis shoes and usually t-shirts were de rigueur. They took an unplanned group photo of my senior class back then, so we were all wearing our “normal” clothes. A few years ago I was showing the photo to a friend of mine who was not from Dalton. After studying the photo for a few moments, they said “everyone looks poor”. Well… I still wear jeans and t-shirts, so there!

Looking at the most recent graduate photos, I have to say there’s quite the variety in hairstyles, much more than in my class. Of course there’s more variety in the culture now than there used to be. If you look at old movies you can pretty much tell what decade the movie was made by looking at the women’s hairstyles. In 1920’s silent films, you see women with a bob. In the thirty’s a perm look became popular. In the forties it was a pretty complicated hairstyle with lots of curls and waves. In the second half of the ’60’s and 70’s it was the long hair trend for the guys that started with the Beatles. Hair styles would start with a few trendsetters in Showbiz and then everyone would take a few years to catch on and get with the program. Folks liked looking like each other. These days there are all kinds of trend setters for men and women and that was reflected in the senior pictures I looked at.d

I think you could probably tell what each person was interested in based on their hairstyles these days. Looking at the ladies first, there were plenty of classic long hair styles, but many of those had some curls or waves thrown in. A few of the women had short hairdo’s and some even had a “punk” style look with wild colors. Others had hairstyles like their favorite singers (Taylor Swift comes to mind as one example). Across the board I have to say a lot of thought was put into it and across the board the ladies succeeded.

For the guys, I commend them for a really wide variety of hairstyles. You look at senior pics from anytime in the late 1940’s to the mid-’60’s here and the guys are going to have about three different hair cuts; a crewcut, a ducktail, or a Brylcreem part. The guys these days had everything from short hair to music star hair to dreadlocks. You could pick out the ones that wanted to look like their sports heroes with cuts that would look right in place on the basketball court or the soccer field. Other guys had simple styles that worked with their natural hair styles instead of against it (unlike me!). And then there were the long-hairs who looked like musicians from the latest rock band. And one thing they had this year we never had was a variety of beards and mustaches.

The common thing about this year’s grads is they all looked beautiful to me … from the inside out!

Mark Hannah is a Dalton native who works in the film and video industry.