1960's Tanning Salon and Spa

1. Tanning Salons: A 1960's tanning salon consisted of a back yard, a big sheet out of the linen cabinet, a pair of GINORMOUS sunglasses, a battery operated FM radio with a long antenna, and a mixture of baby oil and iodine (guaranteed to fry white girls to a crisp.) Of course, a water hose nearby was an essential tanning tool, as the Alabama tanner must have some sort of cooling system, especially when covered from head to toe with a concoction that would fry tater tots. Yes, we did get burnt to a crisp, but it turned to a nice tan after the first or second good peeling.

2. Hair Color: To get those beautiful natural highlights in our hair, we would put lemon juice or peroxide in our hair. Yes, if my memory serves me well, it did actually work.

3. Swimming Strategy:  Alabama summers were the devil, and in order to get yourself invited to the neighbor's swimming pool, you had to put your swimsuit on under your clothes and walk up and down the road next to the neighbor's house complaining about how hot it is outside (very loudly and dramatically). The theory was that when the lucky pool owners (the Samsals) realized their neighborhood children were in dire need of refreshing, they would have the deepest, most sincere sympathy for said neighbors and invite them inside the fence to swim. This theory was tested hundreds of times and found to be very ineffective. We did actually get invited to swim on rare occasions at the pools of the Grays, Willifords, and Calloways. As good fortune would have it, Millbrook had a public swimming pool down at the community center. Mama would take us there from time to time and we LOVED it!!!! They would keep the candy bars in the freezer because candy would melt in 10 minutes flat on an Alabama summer day. Our favorite frozen candy bar was a ZERO!!!!!!!! I remember thinking Linda Houston was the coolest girl on the planet, because although she had spina bifida and got around in a wheelchair, she could go to the bottom of the pool and dive for quarters without holding her nose. I couldn't do that until I was about 15...

4. Outdoor fun: When Mama would let us, we had almost as much fun squirting each other with the water hose as we did swimming. However, water hose water isn't free, and Mama would never let us run the water for very long. After a few years, we figured out that if we wanted to cool down on a hot summer day, we could volunteer to wash the car, and we could kill two birds with one stone.

Times were simpler then, when kids were kids, parents ruled the roost, and neighbors were your friends (well, most of them were anyway....).