The Slice: Hair yesterday: What were we thinking?

Baby boomers have a dirty little secret.

Despite all sorts of evidence to contrary, we like to think of ourselves as hip and happening and also seasoned and wise. But there is one subject that makes us theatrically clear our throats and lurch to change the subject.

It’s this: ’70s hair. Specifically, 1970s boys’ hair styles.

Oh, the humanity.

I recently spent hours sifting through boxes of family photos. The pictures covered multiple generations and captured a wide array of settings and activities.

My dad and his B-24 crew. My mother with some other young nurses. My sister doing ballet. My brother and our dog, Lady. And on and on.

But nothing made my jaw drop until I got to some of the photos of young men in the 1970s.

Oh, my.

As someone born in 1955 – the exact middle of the 1946 to 1964 baby boom years – I speak on this topic with a degree of authority. I’ve seen the hair horror up close. And as I pawed through the boxes of snapshots, I relived it.

What, pray tell, were we thinking?

One snapshot of my childhood friend Bruce almost made me regurgitate. Not only was his hair ludicrously long, it was…well, I don’t want to get too graphic here. Some people are eating breakfast.

I could only shake my head when imagining Bruce’s father, a former B-17 pilot, seeing his son looking like Prince Valiant’s sister.

But believe me, my ’do wasn’t much better. I looked like someone who got his hair styling tips from Joe Cocker or the old “Alley Oop” cartoon strip. And so did virtually all my male high school companions from that Gold Medal class of ’73.

So here’s my question. Why did we think anyone would ever take us seriously after that era?

I mean, after you have demonstrated such poor judgment and shown a herd-instinct fashion sense to such an astonishing degree, how do you recover your dignity?

You move on. To paraphrase a former mayor of Spokane (who was talking about snow), you say “It’s just hair, people.”

So I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours.

Have an old picture of you or someone in your family with a bad case of ’70s hair? Send it to The Slice. Maybe we can face our past together.

Today’s Slice question: What was the worst decade for girls’ hair styles?

Write The Slice at P. O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; email pault@spokesman.com. Name the film/TV director who spent part of his childhood in Missoula, Sandpoint and Spokane.